Hi all,
I'm excited to say that a new version of my budgeting template is available! To download it, see the Home page of this website. For new users, I highly recommend that you watch the overview video on it, which can be found on YouTube here or on the Videos page. I'll be posting a video on each individual sheet in the workbook (hopefully over the next couple of weeks), so stay tuned for more information! I'll post to this blog when those videos go live, so feel free to subscribe to the blog (see website footer below) or my YouTube channel if you want to be notified of new videos.
For returning users who want to know what is new to this version of the workbook:
Summary tab
Added account balances.
Income tab
Added a “cycle” column to mirror the Expenses tab, which allows you to indicate if a given source of income if regularly occurring or not.
Expenses tab
Removed conditional formatting that turned “church giving” orange on expense sheet.
Changed “Food (NG)” to “Food (non-grocery)” (which was technically changed on the Lists tab).
Account Balances tab
This used to be called “Bank Balances,” but the name was changed to indicate that this sheet can actually be used to keep track of any kind of balance you want – as long as it is on a monthly cycle. Do not record more than one balance in a given category per month. I use this for my mortgage, car loan, student loans, health savings account, and individual bank accounts. You could also record credit card balances that you are working toward paying off.
Budget tab
Added an income component (as opposed to just expenses).
Made it more visually appealing in general.
Projections tab
Brand new addition to the workbook.
Allows you to see income and spending from the current month and the month before it.
Allows you to manually enter projected income/expenses by category for as far as you want into the future.
By doing this, the top-most table will calculate your projected “balance” at the end of all future months (in my case, I use this to estimate the total amount of money in my checking and savings accounts combined, but you do not have to do that).
This sheet requires a modest amount of manual input, but I think it is arguably the most useful sheet, and much of the user input could be expedited by copy-and-paste or dragging values across months.
Summary Graphs tab
This tab used to be four separate tabs – a pie chart and bar chart for both income and expenses. I combined all four tabs here because 1) it simplifies the workbook and 2) reduces redundant information. There are no longer pie charts, though the user could add them manually, if desired. I think the bar charts are the more helpful of the two.
This tab also has a new bar chart: individual account balances. This shows the balances for the last month because many accounts (e.g., some bank accounts) do not formally issue a statement until the end of a month, so if this was current month it would have no data for many different accounts. Of course, the user can change this if desired.
The tables that generate these data are directly above the graphs but are grouped and hidden. Click the little “+” all the way on the left to show the table.
The prior version of this workbook showed a total for balances across months, but this was removed since balances should not have been added.
Data Over Time tab
This tab used to be three separate tabs – line graphs for income/expenses, categories of income/expenses, and bank balances over time. I combined those three here because it simplifies the workbook.
The top-most line graph can show overall income, overall expenses, and up to four individual categories within each. It can do this for any financial year or for the last twelve months. The bottom-most line graph shows account balances for up to eight individual accounts, also for either a given financial year or over the last twelve months.
Lists tab
A new table for yes/no responses has been added. This is used on the “Data Over Time” tab to indicate whether overall income/expenses should be displayed (cells K4 and O4).
A new table for month names has been added. This is not currently used but will hopefully be used in the future.
As mentioned for the Expenses sheet, the expense “Food (NG)” was changed to “Food (non-grocery).”
The list of expenses also received five additional categories: credit card payment, HOA fees, homeowner related, property taxes, and visiting family.
Visually, this has not experienced any major changes and all other lists are the same.
FAQ tab
Updated the questions and moved this out of the workbook. It now exists on the website and also as a PDF (available for download on the website). This saves a sheet in the workbook, helping to keep it as simple as possible.
If you liked having the FAQs in the workbook, I would recommend downloading the FAQ file or just copying and pasting the FAQ into a blank sheet at the end of the workbook.
Kommentare