How To Track Your Expenses Using Google Sheets

Why Should You Track Expenses?

Tracking expenses is one of the best way to save your money. Knowing your monthly expenses as it stands against your monthly income empowers you to make better financial decisions.

Once you check your expenditures, you would begin to notice some like patterns. When you have a high level of debt, tracking your expenses can help you make more sensible expenditures.

You can reallocate your monthly income to serve higher priorities, or you can reduce your expenditure on things you do not need. you will also learn if you are overspending on some utility services such as streaming services or gym memberships.

Keeping track of your expenses would be impossible if you do not have a set budget. It would be very difficult to set estimated prices for groceries or for for work supplies if you did not know what you spent in these categories.

By understanding how you do spend your money, you can plan ahead for your future. If your rent keeps going up periodicaly, you will want to know when it becomes unmanageable when compared to your income.

Tracking your expenses is best done by creating a spreadsheet that would automatically totals up your monthly expenditures for you. 

Setting Up Your Spreadsheet to Track Expenses

The first step in getting ready your tracking spreadsheet is to label the columns and the rows accordingly.

you will add the month columns on the top of the page and the expense categories on the left hand side of your spreadsheet. You will also need to tally up the totals for each month and for each category. To do that;

1. Open up a new, blank Google Sheet.
2. Add the months in the Row 1.
3. Add expense categories in the Column A.
4. Add the Total category.
5. Change the colors of months, categories, and the total headers.
6. Highlight the empty cells and change them to currency.

After setting up your spreadsheet, you should be able to start adding your expenses, but you would not see your totals yet.

To do this, you would be required to create a function that would add up the numbers for you, instead of you having to do it manually.

Adding Simple Functions

we will now add some simple functions to our total boxes so that we can add up our monthly totals for each category. To do that;

1. Click on the Total field under January.
2. Click the Functions icon > SUM.
3. Click the B2 cell, hold the shift key, and click B7 cell. Release the shift key.
4. Press Enter.
5. Next, do the same for all the other fields until C8-M8.

Now, anytime you enter an amount into the monthly expenses, you would see the totals being added up automatically for that given month. This would make it much easier to track your expenses without having to manualy add up your totals for each month.

Next, we would take each category expense and add up the totals over the period of a year. To do that;

1. Click field N2.
2. Click Functions icon > SUM.
3. Click B2 cell, hold the shift key, and click M2 cell. Let the shift key go
4. Press Enter.
5. Next, do the same for all the other fields from N3-N8.

Your sheet is now ready to begin entering your monthly expenses. 

Once you start filling out your spreadsheet, you will see how much you are spending each month and how much each expense category is adding up over the year.

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