Good luck!

As for your question, I don’t think the two responses above are appropriate to your needs.

I, too, use Excel and have been using this for personal budgeting for a few years. My expenditure categories have changed over time and I change them when I see a trend emerging where I spend in more/less categories.

I don’t mind having different categories in my worksheet over the year – I use the worksheet mostly to view on a monthly basis, and sometimes compare categories over the year.

Mine is quite simple. I have one excel doc and many worksheets within it, labelled by month.

I create a table with the days of the month going down and the categories along the top right, with daily totals on the end right of each row, and monthly totals per category at the bottom of the table at the end of each column.

At the bottom of the table, I have a row for ‘budget’ – this is the budget I assign per category. In between the ‘monthly total’ row and the ‘budget’ row, I even have a ‘remainder’ row to indicate if I am over- or under- spending in that category.

If you know how to calculate in excel, the formulas are simple.

My categories are separated by the kinds of bills I pay; petrol; entertainment; clothes; etc…

I have an ‘other’ category for stuff that I don’t usually purchase…such as medicine, for example. If I purchase a gift, this also falls under ‘other’.

You can personalise your categories as you see fit!

It’s quite a simple way of keeping track of your expenditure…I find it’s a good tool to keep in control of your finances and I love using Excel for this!

Hope that helps.

Spend some time to try out various finance management software packages (there are several free ones, and most of the paid ones offer trials).

1. Must Haves
2. Could do without
3. Should be Nice

In descending order of importance of course