The Only Personal Finance Spreadsheet You Need!
Get a comprehensive look into your finances with this monthly budget template for personal finance. Set your budgets, track your budgets throughout the month, and view insights on your spending. This free monthly budget template and expense tracker template is a complete overview of your personal finances. From tracking your savings and net worth to giving you detailed charts and metrics every month, it’s everything you need to get organized and educated on your finances. Where is my money going!? This monthly budget template for Google Sheets and Excel will tell you.
Why a spreadsheet?
There are indeed tons of software and apps out there, like Monarch Money and Every Dollar. And sure, these apps are amazing and make everything mostly automatic. This is all great, however, the lack of customization and spending awareness deterred me away. Five years ago, I made the switch to tracking my finances on spreadsheets, and I never looked back! I have logged every transaction and income from the past five years – and people might think that’s crazy. However, using spreadsheets led me to be in touch with my personal finances and know exactly where my money is going!
I dedicate considerable effort to developing these templates, aiming to offer them at no cost. If you appreciate my work and wish to contribute, I accept donations through my website. Feel free to explore other links, as you might find something of value (other templates, spreadsheet tutorials, custom spreadsheets, and more). You can also show support by following me on my socials @ideallysheets, where I post new templates and tutorials frequently.
Monthly Budget Template Guide
Template Sheet
This template sheet holds your monthly budget template. It is meant to stay a template. Ideally, you fill this out and duplicate it each month, that way you’ll only need to make slight adjustments. When you duplicate it, make sure to rename the sheet to the name of the month (accepted formats above). This is important for the year report, which we’ll go over later. NOTE: Orange text guides you on what you should edit!
Anyway, let’s dissect this template sheet. First, expand the ‘Monthly Setup’ section, located in the top left. There are 3 main steps, your budget, bills, and income. If you get stuck, use the example sheet that shows you how to set up the template correctly.
- Budget – Start by inputting your total budget amount for that month. Not sure? Use an estimation, and adjust as you get better insights into your finances. I see many people use the 50-30-20 rule (50% of your money toward needs, 30% toward wants, and 20% toward savings). More information on that here, a good read from Investopedia. After you input your monthly budget, separate that number into the below categories. You may also work backward by inputting each category’s budget to then get a sum of what your total budget should be. You’ll see your remaining budget below the categories. TIP: Later, you may use the Year Report sheet to see an avg. of what you typically spend on each category each month – this can help you set budgets!
- Setup Your Bills – Simple enough, just make sure the monthly bills total number roughly matches the number in your budget. Also, you can use estimations for utilities.
- Income – Input any income you will make that month.
Below that is the ‘Notes’ section, I like to put goals, items to buy, and other things. I found this section useful, but it is optional. After, we’ll change ‘Input Month’ in A30-31 to the current month. Use the dropdown for this (arrow on the right of the cell). That’s it for setting up your monthly budget template.
Now we can close the ‘Monthly Setup’ grouping, and have a nice and clean dashboard. We can see income, total expenses, P/L, and budget balance. P/L is your profit or loss for the month, and the budget balance is how much remaining budget you have left. We also have a spending and budget pie chart. We then see three boxes for navigation on the side, budget, spending, and transactions. Let’s go over these.
- Budget – View your budget amount, spent, and balance.
- Spending – Insights for each category, such as all transactions within that category and the total amount.
- Transactions – Where you’ll spend most of your time. Each transaction you want to track goes here.
Example Sheet
A good place to see an example month for your monthly budget template.
Savings Sheet
Optional, but extremely helpful. Here you’ll get insights on your monthly available savings amount (income – budget), and a savings calculator that helps you allocate funds. There’s also a chart and a table to view your savings over time. One of my favorite parts about this monthly budget template.
So start by adjusting to the current month under ‘Recommended Savings’ by using the dropdown. Use this number as a guide as you input your actual savings amount into the savings calculator (the next table). Feel free to adjust the percentages to your liking, and then you’ll see the calculated amount for each category. Use the last table to place how much each category got for that month.
Net Worth Sheet
A fun tool to track your net worth over time! This is different from the table we just did in the savings sheet because it’s cumulative growth, so if you put $750 into savings in Jan, your savings table is just $750, but your net worth for your savings account is current savings balance + 750.
Year Report Sheet
It’s overwhelming at first (and boring), but that’s because there are no numbers yet! Once we fill out our first month, we’ll start to see some color. The darker the red, the more expensive that month was compared to the other months in that category. The darker the greener, the better those months did (for income, P/L, and savings only). Important to know, this sheet is automatic, the numbers will fill-in automatically.
This is a great place to view your total amount spent for each category throughout the year, and the average for each category throughout the year. The chart is extremely helpful as well in visualizing your finances. That’s a wrap – thanks so much for downloading!
Check out the newest release | Monthly Budget Template Update Log
v1 – first version, released 3/8/24
