After tracking all my expenses for over a year I wanted to put together a worksheet with pivot tables/graphs showing various stats. Consider it for an annual spend review / YTD Spend analysis I want to put together to review with my wife so we can plan.
Problem is I can’t decide what to review and measure.
Does anybody already have a worksheet template with handy pivot tables/charts you use to analyze your spend?
I currently use the Monthly and Yearly Budget worksheets but wanted some more visual aids.
I use the following community solutions add-ins. Take a look at them and see if they will provide you some of the answers you are looking for.
Year to Date Comparison
I find the Year to Date Comparison helpful to see where my budget is over, even or under my estimates. I select Through the Present Month, by category, favorability and sort a to z.
Monthly Analysis worksheet
I find the Monthly Analysis worksheet helpful as it provides a quick YTD by month view of actual vs budget. I select 2024, actual, expense, and all.
Category Tracker
I find the Category Tracker very helpful on what I need to review and focus in on within my spending. You can adjust the start and end dates, select category and expense and count of 5. You will get a pie chart of the top 5 expenses for the date range. I’ve tweaked the pie chart to include percentage too.
You mentioned you use the Monthly and Yearly Budget worksheets. Are you using the Insights and Spending Trends tabs too?
Wow, thank you for these resources, I will definitely take a look at them tonight and Chew on a bit to see. I definitely think it’s what I was looking for. Thank you so so much.
I built a community solution that might be just what you’re looking for! My Cashflow and Networth Analysis Workbook includes multiple dashboards with powerful visualizations to help you analyze your spending, income, assets, and liabilities over time. Check it out and let me know what you think!
The personal finance questions of what to review and measure (and how to make sense of the information) are deep philosophical rabbit holes and are questions of your personal goals and values. Personally, I found the book “Your Money or Your Life” highly valuable for this topic. I loved this book so much that I went to the effort of summarizing it here on my blog. My workbook was largely influenced by this book. I also found this paper by Ben Felix hugely insightful.
Great question and good suggestions already in this thread. One thing I’d add from my own experience: before picking a template, it helps to get clear on what decisions you’re actually trying to make with the data.
For a sit-down review , I’ve found three questions do most of the heavy lifting: Where did we spend more than we expected? Are there categories that are consistently over budget month after month (a pattern), vs. just one-time spikes? And how does this year compare to last year in our biggest categories?
The Monthly Analysis template Clint mentioned is great for the first two. For year-over-year the YTD Comparison add-in is worth the five minutes to set up. Once you know what questions you’re answering, the right visual usually become apparent.
thanks for those suggestions