Jan 2024
Personal Finance Tracker
This is an easy to use excel template that displays your expenses, savings, and income broken down by month and category, with an automated dashboard to keep track of your finances simple.
Functionality
Automated Dashboard to display your overall income, expenses, and savings, with additional pie charts breaking down exactly which categories had the most spending. Formulas are made to be robust and do not require any editing.
Easy to use: Just input your income and expenses, and you’re done! Organized in a way that is intuitive for beginners and simple to follow, allowing you to see in exact detail what your finances look like.
User-Friendly Interface: Designed with dropdowns, color-coding, and visualizations that make managing and reviewing financial data straightforward and engaging.
Customizable: A tab dedicated to customizing the categories was crucial, as that’s what makes it a personal finance tracker.
No Bank Login: Many finance trackers require a bank login to see your financial statements, this comes at a severe cost of security for convenience.
Process
Expenses and Income: I started by creating the sheets where all of the data would be held, and then building out from there. It had to include dates, descriptions, and categories, eventually automating the conscious spending categories.
Dashboard: I wanted users to be able to see everything at a glance, with tables going into the nitty gritty details of where each dollar is spent.
Insights: You can view specific monthly spending and percentages with a simple drop down menu, showing the percentage total of each category paired with a pie chart to see at a glance.
Conditional Formatting: Simple uses of conditional formatting are used to highlight positive and negative values for savings and percentage differences. It is also used to make building the template more efficient.
Formulas: Most formulas in this template are sumifs and xlookups, coupled with basic arithmetic produces a very straight forward spreadsheet.
Template Overview
If you’re interested in using this yourself, you can create a copy of the template here!
