How to Use Google Sheets to Track Your Budget

Did you know that Google has spreadsheets and you can use them to track your budget and savings? You can track your spending and figure out where to cut costs with Google Sheets.

I’ve been using Google Sheets for my home budget (as well as my blog income) for years. Let me show you how to set it up and use it.

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{This post was sponsored by Mason Finance. All opinions and content are my own.}

Step 1: Sign into your Google Account

Or create an account if you’re from another planet and you don’t have one. Then go to the Google Sheets part of Google Drive.

Go to Google Sheets

Step 2: Create an Annual Budget

Select the first template. There is a monthly budget template, but I prefer the annual budget. The template for the annual budget is nicely laid out. It has lots of categories for tracking expenses and income.

You can also look at the year at a glance to see trends in your spending or income.

How to use google sheets to track your budget

Step 3: Set your Starting Balance

The starting balance is how much money you currently have. It defaults to $5,000. You can set it to $0 if you want. That’s how I always do it.

But if you want to always know your balance, put in the amount of money you have now or what you had on January 1st.

If you’re starting in the middle of the year, you can choose to go back and add in everything from the past few months (which I recommend if you have the time) or you can just start from the current month.

If you don’t fill in a month, you’ll need to take that into account if you look at the averages because it might count that month as $0 for everything and throw off your averages.

How to set up expenses on google sheets annual budget tracker

Step 4: Put in Your Expenses

You can go to the expenses tab at the bottom of the screen.

The categories for expenses are in alphabetical order so it starts with Children. That makes perfect sense. They take up a lot of our budgets. lol

What you’re going to use the most is the Everyday category.

Some categories you might be able to ignore. You can either minimize those or delete them entirely.

Make sure you go through all of them. You might find expenses you forgot about like subscriptions your husband has or things you have on autopay.

Don’t forget about all of your insurances. Insurance has its own category. This is also a good time to take stock of what kind of insurance you have. Do you have life insurance? Do you know what kind? You can find out the different types of life insurance here.

Step 5: Put in Your Income

So the annual budget tracker only has one category for wages. So if you and your spouse both work, you might want to add another category.

First you’ll need to add some extra rows. Just click on the 9 and select “insert 1 above” a few times. Then highlight rows 3 through 8, copy, and paste below. Then you can change wages to your names or his and hers.

Adding another category like that will make it show up on your summary sheet. It’s much easier to track your budget if you keep your paychecks separated.

I have a whole category for my blog income because I get paid from about 30 different sources throughout the year. If you want to start a blog you can get started here.

How to use google sheets to track your spending

Step 6: View Your Summary

I set up a sample budget so you can see how the summary works. I wish my budget looked like that. lol Our income is wildly variable.

You shouldn’t edit your summary tab because it has a bunch of formulas in it to pull from the other tabs. You’ll notice that the two categories for wages you made will autopopulate on the summary sheet. You don’t need to add them again.

And if you changed the name of the other categories or deleted them, it will reflect your changes on the summary page.

The best part of this sheet is that it tells you your net savings for each month and for the whole year. I like watching that number and the gray line on the graph go up.

This is also where you can decide what changes you need to make to keep your green line above your red line.

Step 7: Bookmark your Budget Sheet and Keep Updating It

This is the important part. You need to keep updating it to make it useful for tracking your budget.

I update my budget sheet twice a month. But you really just need to update it once a month when you pay your bills. If your online bank is good at keeping records, it won’t be too hard to keep track of.