Budget

The Budget tab is designed to help you put together a detailed budget, and also inform the rest of the Sheets automations about how much you would expect to spend in a month.

Manual User Cells: • Budget Table line items and corresponding details • Yearly expenses table details

This tab is quite important as it drives some portions of the Sheet which help recommend amounts that you can put into Cash/investments. These in particular are driven by the Cash Savings - Automatic and Investment Savings - Automatic line items. Additionally, a major part of a budget that often people miss is yearly expenses. These can often be large lump sums that when added together can account for a large part of your monthly budget. These are automatically summed together and then included in your monthly budgeting amount.

Lastly, any monthly mortgage or liability payments that you have recorded in these respective tabs will also show automatically in your budget.

The Actual spend figure in the top right hand corner is based upon the average spend seen in the Cash tab. This is based off the formula:

Total Income = Total Saved + Total Spent This tab is designed to be only approximate, but make sure to keep it updated and relatively accurate.

Monthly Budget Table

The Monthly Expenses table is where you enter your budget. Each Column has a different purpose:

• ITEM - This is where you would put the name of an expense into your budget that you pay each month. This could be anything, common items could be fuel, a mobile phone bill, your rent or any cost that you incur each month.

• Monthly ($) - In this column enter the amount you spend on the expense each month. For expenses that are not paid monthly, use the yearly expenses table below if this is more appropriate.

• Bank Account - Select the name of the Bank account from the drop down list. This list is populated by the names of the accounts in the Cash tab.

• Category - Assign a category to this expense to help group them together. This populates the graphs to the right.

Yearly Expenses Table

The Yearly expenses table is where you would enter expenses that are paid annually or an a more infrequent basis. You enter in the name of the expense, and then how much it costs per year in the Yearly Cost column. This may be useful for expenses such as vehicle registration or insurances.

The Sheet will then automatically convert this into an equivalent monthly cost for you and place it automatically into your budget under the "Yearly Expenses - Automatic" line.

Automatic Bank Transfers

The Automatic Bank Transfers table is a summary of all the expenses that you have in your Monthly Budget table and from which bank account they are paid, showing you where your money needs to be sent each month. Some use this to automate their savings each month by setting up regular bank transfers that coincide with them they are paid, to send the month to the correct account automatically.

Graphs & Statistics

The Graphics and Statistics area is a summary of your expected Savings and Spend

• Planned Spend - This is how much you are expected to spend on items in your budget that aren't Savings.

• Actual Spend - Going by a 6-month average, this is how much through your monthly recordings you are showing on average as spending.

• Monthly Savings - This is your expected Monthly savings.

• Yearly Savings - This is your expected Yearly savings.

• Estimated Savings - This is your expected Savings rate. For your actual savings rate, please see the Cash tab.

Settings Overview Area

In v2 this area is just a summary of your settings for the Sheet that are used to calculate the numbers for your budget. Please note these cells are not the cells that drive the Budget tab or other parts of the Sheet. These come from the SheetOptions tab.

If you need to change any of these numbers, please do so in the SheetOptions tab and not the Budget Tab.