blankbudget.xls   Budget/Expense Spread Sheet Documentation.

This spread sheet can be used however you would like, it can be used as a budget or track your spending to show you where your money is going.  My recommendation is to save the original file as budgetyear.xls to use it.  This is a new update 09-03-09, I moved the expenses to two columns so it prints well using one sheet of paper centered on the page with 1/4" margins. I call it v3.10

                                 Some things to know about the workbook.

January the first month cells B3 Previous Year end balance and D3 Beginning Savings Balance you will need to know how much you had on hand January first in cash reserves and Savings.  If you start in a different month you will need to fill in what you have to put the starting values in January first and then start from what ever month you are in.  This is because the months of February-December pull the values of B3 Previous Months End Balance and D3 Previous months End of Month Savings from ending values of the preceding month's sheet. 

  I do not track cash/checking/credit cards, ect separately.  I have Quicken to do that, but it doesn't show the over all income/outgo picture very well, that's what this spread sheet does. 
 
In Jan B3 Previous Years Balance put the combined total of cash on hand and your checking.  Do not include credit cards, they are an expense not a source of income.  If you are using your credit cards to exceed your income in spending you have a long term problem you will need to correct.  You can not keep doing that, see what you can trim in your spending or increase your income.

Income is pretty much obvious, put in your take home pay which is what you live on (not gross but net income) and any cash income you may have.  The spread sheet will add your income to the previous year/month/s balance to show you a total of how much money you have available.  

Savings probably takes a bit of explaining.  In January the only two cells you can enter values in are D3 and D4. D3 is Savings Balance and D4 is Savings Interest.  In February - December you can only enter D4 Saving interest.  The values  in D5 From income comes from whatever you put in B11 To Savings.  The Value of D6 Savings Out Go is whatever you take out of savings in B12 From Savings for spending.  D7 End of Month Savings calculates what you have left after you have put money in with B11 or taken it out with B12.  D7 End of Month Savings becomes the value of D3 Savings Balance on the next month's sheet.  It sounds more complicated than it is, once you start doing it the spread sheet does most of the work.

B13 Total Available To Spend is the combined total of B3 Previous Month End Balance, B10 Total Income minus what ever you put in to savings in B11 To Savings, plus what ever you took out of Savings in B12.  Your goal should be to put in to savings and not take out to meet your expenses. Easier said than done some times..

Expenses are in some broad categories.  I don't know what your needs are and as a single guy with no children I'm sure mine are different than most people so I left it pretty generic with some blank lines to enter your own descriptions, you can even change existing descriptions.  The formulas are locked so you can't accidently change them and the workbook is also locked.  You can go to Tools, Protection and unprotect the sheet to change the sheet or the Workbook to modify the Workbook.  If you do modify it, you are on your own with any problems you create.  If you come up with any improvements let me know about them.

The EXPENSES categories and subcategories I created are: 

Housing
	Mortgage/Rent, Second, HOA, Home Owners Insurance, and a blank line

Utilities
             Electricity, Water/Trash, Phone, Cell Phone, Cable/Satellite, Alarm Monitoring,
             Internet, Netflix, two blank lines

Transportation
              Car payment, Insurance, Gas, Oil/repairs/tires, two blank lines

Personal Expenses
              Tithing, Food/Groceries, Clothing, Entertainment, Pets, Medical, six blank lines.

Other Expenses
               Six Credit cards, one to balance the month for unaccounted spending and five blank lines.

You can use it to track expenses by taking the existing value and adding new spending to it on a calculator and putting the result back in the spread sheet.  For example say the existing value for Food/Groceries was $100 you spent $50 more in that category so you would change the value for Food/Groceries  in the spread sheet to $150.

Each Category is totaled at the bottom of it.  D47 TOTAL EXPENSES is a total of the Expense Categories which is subtracted from B13 Total Available To Spend to tell you D48 Remaining at the end of the Month.  Hopefully this isn't a negative number and you are not borrowing from the future to pay for today.  Credit cards are an expense, not a source of income and any spending you do on them is borrowing from the future Plus interest.  Any spending you do above your income with credit cards will show up as a negative number at the end of the month.  You don't want that.

D48 Remaining at the end of the Month becomes the value in B3 Previous Month End Balance in the next month/sheet.  You will need to check to see if you accounted for all your spending and income so the end of the month value is accurate to start the next month.  I add my cash and Checking account values from Quicken to see if they match this number and make adjustments if they don't.  You can use D44 for adjustments for spending you can't account for. At the end of the month your spread sheet should match how much you have left in your spending accounts

Totals sheet gives you the Totals for each item for the year except where noted.

The Average sheet gives you Averages for the year and will calculate the average of the other sheets.  C10 will show you the Total of B10 Total Net Income for the year, not the average. D1 Select month # is the value the sheet divides the total of the values by.  It's default is 12 so if you have 12 full months filled out as a budget it will show you what the average spent in each cell is. However if you are using it to track spending you will need to change the month value to how many months have passed.  For instance if you have just finished July you would put 7 in D1 to divide the data by 7 months.

I've been using this sheet for the last year so I think I've fixed all the bugs.  However the Totals and Averages sheets are new and could have issues.  I've tested them and it seems to work correctly.  Please let me know if you find a problem

Scott
dsscheibe@earthlink.net