Maybe a bit basic but at the beginning of every month I clone this Google Sheets template, set goals in each category, and manually log receipts as I spend. Then at the end of the month, I “audit” my budget against my credit card transactions, pay off credit, and create the next month’s budget with any adjustments learned from the previous one.
For bigger view, long-term, I just linked all my accounts into Quicken and look at it sometimes.
I created my own, very simple sheet back in the day and it served me well enough.
Reality is, unless you’re running a business, tracking every cent in super granular accounts/columns isn’t really useful. My approach was to simply categorize into running expenses, groceries, cloth, leisure, major expenses (washing machine, phones). That makes tracking very simple, so it doesn’t take long and you actually keep doing it.
Maybe a bit basic but at the beginning of every month I clone this Google Sheets template, set goals in each category, and manually log receipts as I spend. Then at the end of the month, I “audit” my budget against my credit card transactions, pay off credit, and create the next month’s budget with any adjustments learned from the previous one.
For bigger view, long-term, I just linked all my accounts into Quicken and look at it sometimes.
I created my own, very simple sheet back in the day and it served me well enough.
Reality is, unless you’re running a business, tracking every cent in super granular accounts/columns isn’t really useful. My approach was to simply categorize into running expenses, groceries, cloth, leisure, major expenses (washing machine, phones). That makes tracking very simple, so it doesn’t take long and you actually keep doing it.