Quick Budget Excel Spreadsheet

I’d like to share with you a useful budgeting tool that I developed in Excel. My objective was to calculate a quick and dirty forecast of my monthly cash flow based on my monthly income and expenses. I’ve officially named the tool “Quick Budget” to reflect that it only takes between 5 – 20 minutes to throw together a household budget.

I chose to develop the tool as an Excel spreadsheet because I find Excel the most flexible and easy to work with for these types of things.

Feel free to download Quick Budget and try it for yourself. I hope you find it useful.

Quick Budget is very simple and easy to use.

Step 1: Input you income. Precisely your monthly after tax income. If you have more than one earner in your family you can easily add additional rows to capture each person’s income. Don’t know your after tax monthly income? Calculate it using my 2011 Income Tax Calculator.

Step 2: Input your expenses. I’ve included the most common expense categories such as housing, food & groceries, transportation, clothing, communication, entertainment etc. Simply input an estimate of what you pay for each expense line each month and the template will automatically calculate out what you’ll pay for the entire year.  If you pay additional expenses that are not included in my template feel free to enter new rows to account for those expenses. Just make sure you adjust the “total expenses” formula to capture all expenses.

Step 3: View your monthly cash flow. There is no action required on your part for this step. The template will automatically calculate your monthly cash flow and cumulative cash flow by month based on the income and expenses you entered previously.

Download: Quick Budget Excel Template

This is version 1.0 of my Quick Budget Excel Template. If you have any constructive feedback on how to improve the tool please send me an email.