Expense Tracking - Create Your Own Expense Template Essay

Expense tracking is paramount to creating and staying within your personal or household budget.  Knowing not only how much you spend but also what you spend it on can help you adjust your spending habits.  If your cash inflows are somewhat fixed (paychecks, interest income, retirement income, etc.), then spending less than what you bring in will allow you to save and/or pay down existing debts.

You can create an expense template in any spreadsheet program or in an accounting ledger or accounting journal. By using a spreadsheet program, you can prevent errors by creating formulas and save time by copying/pasting one month’s sheet over for the other 11 months. And at the end of the year, you can save a copy of your spreadsheet for the coming year (and just delete all of the daily entries). I highly recommend using a spreadsheet or other personal finance software.

Open a new file and enter the month and year in the first cell (i.e. January 2020). In the next row, skip the first column and going across, enter each day of the month in a separate cell. Since I copy/paste the same worksheet for the remaining 11 months of the year, I typically enter 31 days in each sheet. After the last day, enter “Total” in the following column. You will then be able to track the monthly total for each row. In each row below the “Total” heading, enter a formula that will automatically sum each day’s amount for the entire month).

List all of your expenses in the first column (start a few rows down–leave some space at the top). You can group the expenses by category, such as household (rent/mortgage, gas, electric, water, telephone, cable, internet, mobile phone, etc.), auto (fuel, repairs/maintenance, parking), travel/leisure (travel, entertainment, music, movies, books), home (furniture, bedding, houseware), health/beauty (haircare, toiletries, clothing, accessories, shoes).

After you enter all of your expenses, skip a row and enter “Total”. This will allow you to track the total amount you spend each day. In the “Total” row, you should enter a formula that will automatically sum all of the items in the column (i.e. sum B1:B23).

You can also use the expense tracking worksheet to track the amount of income (wages, interest) and deposits you receive each month.

Skip a few rows below your “Total” row and enter the sources of income and deposits you typically receive each month (wages, interest, alimony, retirement, etc.) Don’t forget to copy your formula for each row’s “Total” in the last column. You can also create a formula to sum each day’s total.

Skip another row or two and then create a “Cashflow” row. You should subtract your daily expenses from your daily income. If you prefer, you can just create the formula for the end of the month. This shows your monthly cashflow. If it is a positive number, then you spent less than you received. If it is a negative number, then you spent more than you received.

You can also track recurring monthly payments below the “Cashflow” row. These are for items that you do not want to double-count, such as credit card payments (if you recorded these items as expenses in the current or previous month, then you do not want to record your credit card payment as another expense, as you will be double-counting your expenses). You should also track income that you do not want to double-count separately, such as savings deposits, retirement contributions, mutual fund and/or stock investments, etc.

You should create a separate tab for each month and then a total tab at the end of your workbook, which contains links back to the total information for each month.  Please find a sample below (of the total tab), which you can modify to suit your specific income and expenses.  After you are satisfied with one month (tab), you can copy/paste into additional worksheets.