{"id":185,"date":"2010-07-26T13:39:12","date_gmt":"2010-07-26T19:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vertex42.com\/?p=185"},"modified":"2017-05-16T16:33:57","modified_gmt":"2017-05-16T22:33:57","slug":"money-management-template","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vertex42.com\/blog\/money\/money-management-template.html","title":{"rendered":"Introducing the Vertex42 Money Management Template"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I am very excited to announce the release of my new <a href=\"\/ExcelTemplates\/money-management-template.html\">Money Management<\/a> template. It has long been my goal to create a simple, macro-free, money management spreadsheet that provides the same functionality as basic budgeting and money management software. The bare minimum you need from such a tool is the ability to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Define <strong>budget categories<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Record <strong>payments and deposits<\/strong> for your various bank accounts and assign the transactions to one or more budget categories<\/li>\n<li>Compare your current spending to your budget via a report or dashboard of some kind<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><div style=\"width: 140px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"\/ExcelTemplates\/money-management-template.html\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Money Management Template\" src=\"\/\/cdn.vertex42.com\/ExcelTemplates\/Images\/money-management-dashboard_sm.gif\" title=\"Money Management Template\" width=\"130\" height=\"157\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Vertex42 Money Manager<\/p><\/div><br \/>\nOver the years, I've created many different types of <a href=\"\/ExcelTemplates\/budgets.html\">budget spreadsheets<\/a>, but none of them included a way to record transactions like you can with Quicken or Microsoft Money. I use a spreadsheet similar to my <a href=\"\/ExcelTemplates\/excel-checkbook.html\">checkbook register<\/a> to record my <em>business<\/em> transactions, but it is too complicated to try to share. Such is the case with most spreadsheets that people create for themselves. If a spreadsheet is so difficult to use and customize that you might as well create your own from scratch, it doesn't make a good template.<\/p>\n<p>I've always used Quicken for my personal finances (and will probably continue to use it), so the real motivation for creating the Vertex42\u00ae <a href=\"\/ExcelTemplates\/money-management-template.html\">Money Management Template<\/a> came from the prompting of multiple customers over the past few months. In my first attempts, I tried using separate worksheets for different accounts, like Quicken, but that didn't make the spreadsheet simple enough to customize. Recording transactions for multiple accounts (checking, credit cards, savings, etc.) within a single worksheet turned out to be the solution.<\/p>\n<p>I don't want to be too redundant, so to learn more about the new <a href=\"\/ExcelTemplates\/money-management-template.html\">Vertex42\u00ae Money Manager<\/a>, visit the download page.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Try it out and come back here to leave your comments and suggestions.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Update 5\/16\/2017<\/strong> - Many people have asked about how to track money that is allocated to future expenses or individual savings goals. One method is to create virtual sub-accounts via the <em>Accounts<\/em> worksheet. This method allows you to use the <em>Transactions<\/em> worksheet and record transfers just as you would with a real account, except that these transfers and the sub-accounts don't show up on your actual bank statements. Another approach is to use a separate spreadsheet to track individual goals (such as the <a href=\"\/ExcelTemplates\/account-register.html\">Account Register<\/a> or <a href=\"\/ExcelTemplates\/savings-goal-tracker.html\">Savings Goal Tracker<\/a>). Because this is such a common request, I've added a new <strong>Goals<\/strong> worksheet into the money-manager.xlsx file that lets you track individual savings goals. <\/p>\n<p>-----<\/p>\n<p>I know this is going to come up, so I'm going to mention it now: The ability to automatically important transactions from your financial institution(s) would be a bonus time saver, but that is not a critical feature and would add a significant amount of complication to the spreadsheet. So please don't ask for this feature - it's not going to happen. I purposely avoid using macros and VBA within my templates because I've found that causes the number of questions and problems to sky-rocket.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Announcement of the new Vertex42 Money Manager &#8211; a free powerful Money Management spreadsheet that can be used in place of other money management software.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[71,49,76],"class_list":{"0":"post-185","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-money","8":"tag-budgeting","9":"tag-money-management","10":"tag-templates"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vertex42.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vertex42.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vertex42.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vertex42.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vertex42.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vertex42.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vertex42.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vertex42.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vertex42.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vertex42.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}