Track Your Daily Spending on a Monthly Budget Calendar

The Monthly Budget Calendar is a minimalist spending tracker and monthly budget for Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.

Set your monthly spending target, automatically track your daily and cumulative spending, and see what’s available until the end of the month.

Because the Monthly Budget Calendar is powered by Tiller Money Feeds, it shows your actual daily transactions.

This free template can now be installed in Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.

Background

When it comes to managing my finances, I focus most on my spending and cash flow. And even though I review my transactions almost daily, I rarely maintain a detailed budget. 

Most of my savings obligations and payments are fixed and automated. What lands in my checking account is what I use to spend all month. 

Still, I wanted a simple, unfussy way to track my monthly spending against a target. That’s partly because of inflation – my money isn’t going as far as it used to. By the end of the month, I was starting to worry about my spending.

So in my Foundation Template for Google Sheets, I cobbled together a simple monthly calendar and applied very basic spreadsheet formulas to pull in daily totals from my Transactions Sheet. 

It was ugly but it worked. Each day I could see what I spent, how my actuals compared to my target, and how many days remained until the end of the month. 

However, as I was recently reviewing customer feedback, I noticed a request for a way to “track my spending and know how much I have left on any day within the month.” Soulmate! 

So I showed my frankensheet to Randy and requested some help. Within hours he created a fantastic monthly budget calendar powered by Tiller Money Feeds that we can now share with the Tiller Community. 

The Monthly Budget Calendar is minimalistic by design with just a few customizable options:

1. Choose the year.
2. Choose the month.
3. Input your Monthly Budget spending target.
4. Choose how you want to gather your daily expenses.
5. Watch the magic happen. 

Regarding the fourth step, there are four different ways to gather expenses:

1. All Withdrawals will total each day’s negative transactions. You will not need to categorize any data to use this template immediately, but transactions like transfers may make your daily totals inaccurate.
2. Withdrawals 🚫 Transfers totals each day’s negative transactions but will ignore any transactions categorized as a Transfer category type. If you haven’t categorized many transactions, but want to exclude a few transactions, just categorize those and let the rollup do its magic.
3. Categorized Expenses totals only transactions categorized to an expense category while ignoring income, transfers, and uncategorized transactions (including positive refunds categorized in expense categories).
4. Categorized Group Expenses allows you to select an expense-category group and will total transactions categorized to that group (including positive refunds categorized in expense categories).

Each calendar day shows:

• The date and day of the week
• Your spending actuals based on the filter selected above
• Cumulative spending for the month
• How much is left before you hit your selected spending target
• A sparkline visualizing your spending increasing to your target

If you exceed your monthly spending target, your sparkline turns red, and your amount turns negative.

Installation

The Monthly Budget Calendar is now available for free for Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel.

Questions and Feedback

Share your questions and feedback in this thread in the Tiller Community