True monthly net income

New to tiller but not budgeting. Like envelope system but not tied to it, and not strict with my budget more to be a guide on monthly spending. Something I struggle with lately is a true / actual net monthly income. My issue is around “saving goals” and money that doesn’t leave my account.

Say I have income of X and spend of Y then my net is Z. But this doesn’t account for the any money I want to set aside each month for year gifts, vacation, insurance, etc. which isn’t spent but I also don’t want to spend it.

Is there a sheet or method that would allow me to see my net income each month and include what I set aside for savings knowing that the money has not be spent and may or may not be moved between other accounts. In most cases the money is all in the same account.

For example
Month income - 5000
Month Spend - 3500
Month Savings - 1000
Month net - 500

In the sheets and set up I have right now the monthly savings is not factored in so it appears as if my monthly net is 1500 when I would rather see it as 500.

The goal here is to make sure 1. not spending more than I brought in, 2. my savings goals are properly funded. 3. is there any additional funds left over that can be used for other upcoming expenses or moved to long term savings.

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Welcome, @cdh0127 :wave:

My recommendation here would be to create a manual “journal” transaction for the $1000 savings and use a Savings category that is set an Expense type category. That way your actual cashflow on the Monthly Budget will show up as $500 as it will account for the $1000 being set aside.

This wont actually correlate to any account balances though. If you’re interested in seeing how you’re doing against savings goals within the context of your real world account balances I recommend checking out the Savings Goal Tracker Beta sheet. It won’t show your net amounts but it’s at least a sanity check against your account balances. It only uses account balance data to factor in money saved, it doesn’t pay attention to transactions at all.

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Heather,

Thank you, I’m working through your suggestion and have a couple of follow up questions.

  1. I am using the savings tracker which does help check the budget however I notice this only reflects what I’ve planned to save and not what may have been spent. For example, I save $500/mo for vacation and should have $3000 to date but let’s say I put a $1000 down payment in April. Would the tracker show the balance minus the down payment so the balance would be $2000?

  2. Back to the net amount, I’m working on the June Savings budget in which it appears any savings actuals are being included in the June actual expenses but this seems to be misleading. If I spent $200 for say birthday gifts this month but had saved $100 every month I’d rather see this reflected in the available column since it’s coming from savings and not my actual spend for June.

I guess what I’m looking for is a way to see my savings amounts to date minus any money spent throughout the year. In some cases there may be a transaction, emergency savings to a high yield account while others (auto insurance, gifts, vacation) would be tied to primary checking account. Meanwhile from a budget standpoint I don’t need to see the activity of these saving categories, just the funds set aside each month.

I am an IT professional so if there are any other worksheets or advanced options I could try feel free to send them my way. Appreciate any feedback.

Thanks,
Chris

I had the exact same need. What i did was a simple hack with my limited google sheet knowledge

  • All transactions where i do investment or sale is categorized as “Investment Purchase*” or “Investment Sale*” So mutual fund purchase will be Investment Purchase MF etc
  • in the monthly budget sheet i just few additional formulas to the top
  • Investments made =IFERROR(-SUMIF($V16:$V, “Investment Purchase*”, $W16:$W), 0)
  • Investments redeemed =IFERROR(SUMIF($V16:$V, “Investment Sale*”, $W16:$W), 0)
    Then i had another cell to see how much is the true monthly net which is basically Monthly cashflows - Investments made + Investments redeemed.
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We need a good report that compares actual income, expense, and “profit” vs budget with the ability to define the number of actual periods we want to see. That would be helpful.

Just wanted to make sure you have reviewed the Savings Budget sheet (in addition to the Savings Goals template that was already provided). Surplus income and/or under-spend in expense categories can be allocated how you like by doing “adjustments.” I would recommend you do “Savings” adjustments and not “Budget” if you try it out, so you’re not modifying your actual budget.

Yes, I have the Savings Budget sheet and once I update I see the correct amounts showing up for my short and long term goals. I’m attempting to review the manual “journal” option but in some cases money moves to a different account while in others it doesn’t.

I think I’m going to figure out how to modify the actual column, F which if I could exclude any thing that equals “savings” from the categories sheet and then include the budget column from categories that equals “savings” this would give me my true net.

Thanks for the update here. Definitely feel free to share your solution if you figure out how to modify it to meet your needs. I don’t have enough expertise around the Savings Budget to help with this one.