Smart Spending Tracker & Goal Setting Template (Google Sheets)

Hi! I work in data engineering and analytics by day, but have a sincere appreciation for simple solutions. With costs increasing across the board over the past few years, I wanted to create something simple to help me understand my spending habits as well as easily identify areas that would be the most impactful for me to reduce spending in. So, I built something in Google Sheets, beta tested it on Reddit, and after a few revisions have a great template that I really thing many others would find extremely useful!

What is it?

• A Google Sheets template that will analyze your previous year and current year purchases (from manual bank data exports) and summarize them by:
  • Category and subcategory
  • YTD total spend
  • Monthly Average
• And, it will show you how you're spending right now compared to goals you chose for yourself!

Why I love it, and I think you will too:

• You don't have to love spreadsheets to like this. The main tab you'll interact with is a dashboard - not a sea of rows and columns - which presents insights and information to you in simple charts and sentence form.
• You set the rules! This sheet will come with a list of default keywords to match against your transaction descriptions, but you can change them or add your own based on where you shop and how you'd like those purchases categorized.
• It quickly and easily brings to light your top spending areas, and sets quantified goals - something tangible you can hold yourself accountable to.
• Lastly, it can help you save hundreds a month!

Need to know:

• This isn't a fully automated solution - you will need to manually export CSVs from your bank and paste into this spreadsheet.
• This template requires previous year data (along with current year) to work. You may want to confirm you can export all or most of your transactions that occurred the previous year before purchasing.
• It will require some finessing. Those custom rules I mentioned earlier? You will need to invest a little up-front time to review your transactions and categorize them based on your preferences. Trust me, 15 minutes of very light data entry is worth it to help make the dashboard more accurate and helpful!

Disclaimer:

This product may not be sold, shared, or redistributed without prior written consent by the author.