Use this free income and expense tracker template to track your income and expenses. The transaction register shows each individual transaction, and allows you to save images of your receipts directly into the register for easy reference when necessary. (It won't always be necessary. As noted expert Mitch Hedberg says, it's hard to imagine a scenario where you'd have to prove that you bought a donut.)
The summary worksheets will show you a month-by-month breakdown of your finances. This template also uses Related Row columns within the Register to reference the Payees as a 1-way relationship. It uses a Select data type for the Accounts column, and the most convenient method to enter transactions is by using a Form (via the Form view in the Register worksheet).
If you have any expenses, an expense tracker template like this one can record your transactions and help you organize your finances. It's easier than ever to spend money without thinking about it, thanks to credit cards, instant digital payments, online ordering, and that restaurant in town with the good food, you know the one. But tracking your finances is a good way to keep them in order and get a handle on your spending, while making sure you can plan for recurring expenses.
If you don't have any expenses, bookmark this page, and come back when you move out of your parents' house.
An income and expense tracker works similarly to a checkbook ledger, only this template is more robust, allowing you to track your income and expenses across multiple accounts, not just checking. It also allows you to enter more information and categorize transactions, so you can get a fuller picture of exactly where your money is going and whether enough of it is sticking around.
No American president has ever used this income and expense tracker spreadsheet template. Also, as of the time of this writing, America's National Debt was $30,252,318,436,572. Those are the facts; you can draw your own conclusions.
An optimist is more likely to track their income and not their expenses. A pessimist is more likely to track their expenses but not their income. A smart person who wants a realistic view of their finances will track both.
You might think it would be easier to track your income and expenses if money didn't exist. But it's actually much harder with a barter-based economy, because you have to put a wooden chair, 20 chickens, and 5 hours of physical labor into the same column and get them to add up.
The income and expense tracker template above includes four worksheets:
Register - this is your complete register of all transactions, listing not only dates and what Account type the transaction was drawn on, but also the payee and check number when applicable. Each transaction is marked as Expense, Income, or Transfer, and categorized for easier tracking. Receipts can be attached right in the spreadsheet, and the Memo field covers any additional information. When you enter the Amounts (positive and negative) of each transaction, the sheet is designed to automatically calculate your running balance.
Summary - Provides a month-by-month overview of your income and expenses by category. Your monthly start and end balances are displayed along the top of the chart, and then monthly expenditures broken down by category are detailed below. The final two columns show your total spending on each category so far, and the monthly average of that total divided by the number of months tracked.
Payees - A simple list of your Payees, along with their contact information. Note that "Payees" in this case includes descriptions for anywhere money is sent, such as "Transfer INTO Account" and "Other".
About - More detailed information about this free template, and instructions on how to use some advanced features.
Well, "need" is a strong word. You need food and water and shelter, and that's about it. Technically you don't "need" the Internet, although you want it because your life is certainly going to be much easier with it than without it. And this income and expense tracker template is much the same way. It's not technically necessary, but it is designed to make your life a little easier.
By using this free expense tracking template, you can get a detailed and categorized look at your spending, in order to help you create a budget and notice any area where you're spending a lot more money than you thought. Having a realistic picture of your spending behavior is a key step in improving your spending to be more efficient, and budgeting more effectively.
Our brains are really good at intuitively knowing that if we pay a $120 electricity bill every month, we need to budget $120 monthly for electricity. Well done, brains. But our brains aren't always the best at intuiting that buying a coffee and some snacks whenever we feel like it ends up costing $80 per month. Or intuitively realizing that even though we haven't spent any money on computers in six months, the fact that we did a $12000 upgrade for the office eight months ago might mean that we need to budget $1000 per month for computers.
You could certainly figure any of those things out if you took long enough to think about them and could remember exactly how much you spent and when. You're pretty smart. But your brain is already filled up with a lot of things more important than remembering how much you spent on coffee 17 weeks ago or trying to recall what fiscal year that big computer upgrade was in.
That's the advantage of an income and expense tracker template like this; you can simply record all of your expenses, let the spreadsheet do all the remembering and calculating for you, and free up your brain to think about more important things—like whether it would be better to be able to fly or turn invisible.
Business Owners
Whether you're running an office of five or an office of 500, an income and expense tracking template lets you track standard office expenses like utilities, conference fees, and llama transport. Knowing where your money is going and budgeting ahead will help you avoid any cash flow issues.
Business Employees
For any employee with an expense account, an expense tracking template is the perfect way to record everything you pay for on your business trip, from gas mileage to meal expenses to llama rental. You can attach your receipts right in the spreadsheet, to ensure that all of your spending will be properly reimbursed.
People
Not to imply that business owners and employees aren't people. But a free income and expense tracking template is also very useful for personal expense tracking and budgeting, allowing you to record monthly income alongside household expenses like appliances, toiletries, and llama chow. Those llamas aren't going to feed themselves.
