How to Create a Budget Worksheet Using a Google Sheet?
Cash is the most liquid asset a person can have. If you don’t know how to manage it well, like planning on what particular items you will buy, tracking down your expenses, and by making a budget for a particular period like making a budget plan for a week or month, you will end up nothing left on your pocket. There are different tools for making a budget using some software online. You need to pay for registration and downloading some tools while some tools are free. Before you invest in some complicated money management tools, it is better to simply make a simplified budget using Google Sheets. This article will give you information on HOW TO CREATE A BUDGET WORKSHEET IN GOOGLE SHEET?
OPENING A GOOGLE SHEET ACCOUNT
You can make your own Google Sheet budget template online and this is free and will take only an hour or less. By creating a budget like this, you will learn more about the inflows and outflows of your money for a particular period. The first thing to do is go to your google drive account. When you are on the page, in the left portion, click new and Google Sheets.
CREATING INCOME AND EXPENSE CATEGORIES
It is important to categories your money for you to know if you will have net income at the end of the week or month or you incur losses in that particular period. Categories are the main backbone of making a budget. Using this google sheet template online is like encoding some numbers using your Excel or Spreadsheets if you are familiar with these applications. On the Income portion, list down all the items like all the cash inflows that go into your hand or bank accounts such as your salary, paycheck, side hustle, other income like sales if you are into business, and income from your investments like interest you earned from all your bank deposits and cash inflows from your dividends and other trading investments. Add all the amount and the total would be your gross income. Next is to list down all your expenses or all those cash outflows transactions. Knowing our expenses is important for us to minimize our spending habits and to limit some amount in the Expense categories. Examples of expenses are utilities like electricity and water bill, communication expenses, rent if you are paying for monthly rent, vehicle, food, medicine, tuition fees of your children, transportation cost, life insurance, health, and other personal expense you have like shopping and entertainment. Add all the amount in your expense categories and the total expense amount will be deducted from your gross income.
DECIDE WHAT PARTICULAR BUDGET PERIOD TO USE
It’s up to you if you want to make a daily, bi-weekly, weekly, monthly, semi-annual, quarterly, or yearly budget. The particular period you will use depend on how you are frequently paying those expenses, how much time you want to spend in making some updates in your budget spreadsheet, and how closely you may want to monitor all your finances. Another option is using multiple budgets in a period simultaneously. Most budget software and apps track income and all expenses by month. Then they will sum all those monthly budgets to make an annual budget. Regardless of what budget period you will be creating, there must be three specific columns in your Google Sheet. The general column is intended for the income and expense account titles or names. The first specific column is for your budgeted income and expenses amount, next is the column intended for actual income and expense amount, and the last one is a column that will show the difference between the two (budgeted and actual) so that you will see the actual difference and the complete picture if you make some progress.
USE SIMPLE FORMULAS TO MINIMIZE TIME COMMITMENT
Manually adding all the income and expense amounts using a calculator is time-consuming, but here in Google Sheets, it would only take some minutes as it has easy formulas if you are familiar with it. You can get the difference between your budget and actual income and expenses amount by subtracting the cell that has the actual amount from the cell containing the budget amount. You can also vertically add all of your income and expenses amount by using the sum formula. Please familiarize these basic formulas like using summation in every cell and other mathematical operations for you to use this application easier.
INPUT YOUR BUDGET NUMBERS
Creating a weekly or monthly budget is nothing more than setting a financial goal. Your income must put a hard limit on the amount on your allowable expense. The main reason why you are tracking down your cash transactions is to have net income at the end of the period by not incurring losses. Within the parameters of your income, it is easy for you to decide what to spend and how you will spend your money. It’s now time for you to input the budgeted amount. Your historical financial data is an important jumping-off point for creating a budget. Look through the final past statements or the last few months of your bank records for you to see where your actual money is going.
UPDATE YOUR BUDGET
As your chosen budget in a period progresses, make sure to update regularly your budget worksheet with all of your actual amount and items transactions. You need to adjust your budget to some accounts like emergency spending or inflows from unplan income. Don’t worry if your budget and actual income and expense amount vary. The more you use your budget, the more accuracy you will get.
Budgeting is all about making self-awareness of all of your money inflows and outflows. Creating a budget using this online application is not that difficult. You don’t need some complicated spreadsheet applications with advanced formulas for you to have a thorough financial budget. If you are not using this one, HOW TO CREATE A BUDGET WORKSHEET is important for you to have more money left in your pocket or your bank accounts.