Free Money Management Template

I will be the first to admit that the most complicated part of using the Vertex42® Money Manager is customizing the budget categories. Luckily, you only need to do this once with maybe a bit of tweaking each year. Essentially, you just need to make sure that the categories are exactly the same in all worksheets.

Video Tutorial (Customizing Budget Categories)
On Screencast.com | On YouTube.com

What you need to watch out: If you assign a transaction to a category that is not included in the Budget or Report worksheets, the expense won't show up in your reports and you'll think you have more money than you really do. I've added conditional formatting to help prevent these types of mistakes, but the spreadsheet is definitely not error-proof.

I've tried very hard to include a comprehensive set of income and expense categories, so if customizing the categories is too scary, just try to use the default list.

I intend to write more on this subject in the future. For now, you can learn about creating a budget in almost any personal finance book, reading online blog articles on budgeting, etc. See the article How to Make a Budget and read through these 5 Budgeting Tips.

The second most difficult part of using the money management template is learning to enter transactions into the Transaction worksheet correctly and efficiently. If you have a good understanding of how to copy, insert, and delete rows, it should be piece of cake. It is very important that you always copy entire rows (instead of inserting blank rows) so that you preserve the formatting, data validation, and formulas that are both visible and contained in hidden columns.

After a while, you may find that entering transactions with the spreadsheet is faster than using Quicken because of how easy it is to copy and paste, using older transactions as "templates" for new transactions.

Can I use Autofiltering? Yes. If you know how to define "Lists" or "Tables", go for it, but make sure you know what you are doing. If you know how to use Autofiltering, you may find it convenient to use the filtering to display transactions for a single Account at a time when you are reconciling.

Can I import transactions from my bank? Unfortunately, no. The money management template is not quite that fancy. I also have no plans in the future to add the ability to automatically import transactions from your bank or other financial institution. There is no online connectivity built into the money manager. If you want that kind of functionality, you may want to use some other dedicated budget software.

A very important part of good money management is keeping track of how your current spending compares to your budget. You might check your budget status on a weekly or even daily basis, but you should at least manage your money on a monthly basis.

Use the Report worksheet to compare your budget to your actual spending throughout the month. You can change the month by simply entering the month number (1 for January, 2 for February, etc).