This is fantastic, thank you! Iāve never had a way to deal with all the nuances of my budget like this. Even the simplest such as getting paid bi-weekly. So this is huge for me. Appreciate the effort you put in here!
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Agreed. It is a pretty awesome tool by @jpfieber.
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@jpfieber Your budget plan seems to be the best one out there. I feel like the features Iām looking for are there, but Iām not finding them.
Is there a way to set up group budgets instead of category budgets? To make this work for me (large annual/semi-annual expenses that need monthly savings), Iāve created four useful budget groups (rather than using the default two: living/discretionary):
- Fixed Monthly (e.g., mortgage, internet, phones, savings)
- Fixed Yearly (e.g., property taxes, annual insurance)
- Flex Monthly (e.g., utilities)
- Everything Else (a group that includes shopping, groceries, restaurants, and literally everything else where we make an active choice to spend money).
Iām trying to use groups and categories like categories and subcategories, similar to intuit software. I still want to know how much weāve been spending on restaurants versus groceries, so I still want the categories, but from a budget point of view, I just need to see that weāre staying within the guardrails.
The second thing is for those Fixed Yearly Expenses. I need the budget to assume on the first of the month that that money is gone. And then when I spend it at the appointed time, I donāt want it to yell at me. My current work-around plan is to make a fake manual bank account, create a transfer transaction for the monthly amount on the first of every month - to make the budget show the funds are spoken for. Then when paying, make a fake transfer back with the category matching so that it comes to $0 on the budget.
Thanks
PS the bi-weekly paycheck handling is really the greatest thing. It is so helpful for those two months a year.
The template wasnāt designed with Group budgets in mind. It might be possible to hack it to do what you need, but itās been a long time since I worked with that code, so nothing jumps to my mind. For the fixed yearly expenses issue, I donāt have a better solution than what youāve come up with. Thanks for the kind words, sorry I canāt assist more.
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This is a great budget plan. Thank you so much for creating it. I was wondering how can I change the background font because when I copied the categories from the categories sheet over to the budget plan sheet, the color is pink, and it wonāt allow me to change the background color. Thank you.
Whenever you copy/paste stuff like that, do a copy, then a āpaste specialā and choose āvalues onlyā so formulas and formatting are not brought along, only the values you see in the cells. Iām guessing whatever youāre seeing is due to āConditional Formattingā.
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Yes, itās wierd because I did the paste special like you mentioned with values only, so Iāll just have to keep it the way it is. Thank you for your reply.
I really like this budget plan, thanks for all the work you put into it!
One thing I wanted to have is my budget schedule that moves throughout the year. Right now, I donāt need to see this yearās Jan budget anymore, but seeing next Jan budget could be useful. So I edited the Budget start day M3 to be =EOMONTH(EDATE(TODAY(),-3),0)+1. This keeps the last two months of budget data from the current day. So far it is working, not sure if there would be some weird dates that may get odd results. This does not do much yet, but I feel in Sep-Dec it will be really nice to see into 2026.
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Dear Joseph,
I find this template very useful when starting a new year. I do however set my budget by the annual amount. If I try to divide the Annual Amount by the Occurance, a circular error occurs. It does not matter whether the Annual Amount is located is my Categories sheet, or in a new column in Budget plan sheet. Do you have any recommendations to have the Amount column reflect the Annual Amount divided by the occurance?
Thanks,
Lorraine
Not sure I follow, but it sounds like youāre trying to take last years amount and divide it by occurances? If thatās the case, would āPast-Category/Past-Category-AVG-Yearā or āPast-Description/Past-Description-AVG-Yearā maybe work?
Thank you for the quick response. I was not clear. I can do what you suggested but it doesnāt always work well because sometimes there are odd one-off expenses that donāt carry forward to a subsequent year. The template requires me to enter an amount in column M representing the monthly, quarterly, or whatever the frequency is set to to distribute the amounts to the months columns. I added an annual amount column (column K) then have a formula in column M take that annual amount and divide by the Occurance to avoid calculating the event amount, but a circular reference happens.
Here is the formula to capture the annual amount from my Categories sheet for the specific category, but I donāt want to divide by Budget Plan column J value, rather than enter it manually.
=XLOOKUP(E4,āCategoriesā!E$2:E$93,āCategoriesā!F$2:F$93/12)
Seems this is an edge case that goes beyond what the sheet was designed for. Iām sure itās doable, but would require customizing some of the code, and I havenāt touched it in a few years so Iām no longer up to the task. Sorry, hope youāre able to figure a workaround!
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Are you able to track down how the circular error propagates, @lorrainedamico? Sometimes things are a little nested but usually it ultimately makes sense how calculations like this can drive one another in a loop. I think if you can figure out the calculation path, you will be able to break the circular chain.
I am trying to add my new budget for 2026. I have 2024 and 2025 in there and last year when I followed the process to add 2025 it worked fine. On the yearly budget sheet I can switch from 24 to 25 and everything reflects correctly. I am following the same process to add 2026. When I do, I can see that my entries into the budget plan are showing up correctly in the categories sheet under the 2026 columns. But when I go to the year budget sheet and change the year to 2026 the budget numbers are not showing up. The actual numbers are but not the budget numbers. Iāve tried everything, including downloading both the years budget and budget plan templates to start from scratch. No dice. Anyone experienced this or have any ideas what to try outside of narrowing everything down to only keep one year on record?
Hello, is there any way to carry unspent budget dollars for a category over to the next month with this budget plan?
I donāt recall anything like that, but itās been years now since Iāve used it.
You are no longer using this template that you created? Are you using something else you find better? If so, do you mind sharing what it is?
Itās still the best budgeting tool Iāve seen (I might be biased), but I found budgeting wasnāt helping me. I still track my transactions and watch my categories, but I havenāt been investing time in budgeting.