What does your monthly budget review process look like? Walk us through it. I would give an example of mine, but I haven’t yet made this a part of my workflow, so I’m really curious what others are doing and if something similar will help me!
I don’t do a monthly review in a traditional sense, I use the Savings Budget, so I true up the categories with monies from other categories as you would if you use an envelope (and that is part of your strategy I suppose). If I notice an upward trend in spending, I do adjust my budget. I have a Misc category that is also used for sinking funds, so generally I pull from there. Or in a more recent case, I have adjusted books and entertainment as I am buying more books than going out. My bigger process for budgeting is at the end of the year setting things up for the next year.
I too am curious to see what others do. I love seeing the other processes out there.
We like looking at the Year to Date Comparison, sorted by Favorability. We can see where we are over/under budget and know if it is conscious decisions or just overspending. This way we can decide not to worry about being over budget in a category in any given month, as long as the year is trending in a good direction.
I made a slight modification to include all transactions for the current month are included (I do a lot of future dated recurring bills) and this is also the sheet where I get my “uncategorized transactions” count in case I missed something as it came in.
I first reconcile my latest account statements.I then review any large expense category that is trending to go over my total yearly budget estimate for that category. I also look for any expense category that is trending to be significantly less than what was budgeted for that category for the year. I also account for any new expenses that were not planned by adjusting the budget or creating a new category. I move excess budgeted dollars or savings where needed to keep the total budget balanced.
I have a “Month End Close” process that I manage in Todoist which I use for all task / project management. I’m retired now so my processes have on one hand simplified while bolstering others. For the latter that really means tracking some task stuff that in the past I never really did because it seemed pedantic. I now have the time, so I track those items now.
Anyway, my process is the following and usually in this order:
- Balance Fidelity Spending account using Account Reconciliation sheet.
- Balance my two credit card accounts using Account Reconciliation sheet.
- Reconcile the Savings Budget sheet.
- Update Categories and Group level Budget sheets to account for one-off or outlier expenses that shouldn’t apply going forward.
- Review and update our Subscriptions which have their own Budget Plan worksheet feeding Categories because the monthly rates tend to change on those somewhat frequently and I’m ad-hoc activating / pausing them fairly often depending on how we use them. (On a separate note, I bastardized @jpfeiber Budget Plan process for my own use so I have separate Budget Sheets for most of my Groups in Categories).
- Pay off credit card balances to zero.
- Update Categories or any of my Group specific Budget Plan sheets for upcoming month if I know of a one-time expense that is going to hit that I didn’t already know about.
- I then transfer money into Fidelity Spending for the coming month’s planned budget from (1) my wife’s separate business revenue account at Fidelity, if applicable and/or (2) our online savings account.
Step 8 has recently changed for me and I’m still getting the hang of what I want to be doing here. We went from a consistent, paycheck direct deposit + more rolling CC payoff process to a more manual one that requires me to do more transferring of funds. We both went from corporate jobs to ultimately me being retired and wife running her own business with sporadic pay. Thus, moving money is more manual and math crunching now. Pretty much always ran a surplus when we were dual income and never really worried about rolling the month over too much back then, but now I have to be more on the ball with how much money I really need in our account.
This is the monthly/quarterly rhythm I “try” to keep to…all of these steps are managed in Tiller with the exception of a separate 1040 tax forecasting spreadsheet I use for tax planning/projections and Boldin software modeling for long-term forecasts and scenario planning. I have been able to build an integrated donation tracker tab, retirement account withdrawal planning tab, and investment account performance tracking (with investment decision modeling at a holding level) all within Tiller. I have wanted to find one tool that could manage the breadth of these functions and have found it in Tiller…I hope this diagram helps.
Weekly (or even twice weekly):
- import transactions into Excel
- reconcile against receipts and bank statements, split as necessary, and categorize
- glance at Monthly Budget to see where things stand in each category, especially groceries and household expenses
- pay off credit cards if needed
- communicate with my husband and discuss anything noteworthy in the recent past or anticipated expenses
Monthly:
- add manual transactions for mortgage balance and home value (unsupported accounts)
- review Monthly Analysis sheet and look specifically at three or four categories that fluctuate
- adjust Budget Plan if a category is trending upward beyond my control or if needs have changed
- review Net Worth sheet and glance over retirement accounts
- evaluate amount remaining in checking account and move “excess” to savings if unlikely to be needed quickly (retirement savings, sinking funds, and savings already transferred separately)
Quarterly: manually enter all info from Monthly Analysis sheet into secondary Excel budget “archive” that has budget data going back to 2007. This gives me another chance to review outliers, find errors, and update a workbook that isn’t connected to any external sources (on purpose). It takes me an hour at most to fill in the category totals for about 60 categories for 3 months at a time. Then I update about ten charts with new formulas so I can visualize how much more I’m spending on electricity, for example, than I was ten years ago. (I need to turn this into a Pivot Table, I know!) I’ll add notes for budget outliers in this separate workbook like “new roof” when the home improvement budget is suddenly dramatically higher, but I don’t want a whole separate category for one single transaction. Tiller is a great intermediary, but it just doesn’t function at all for me as an archive for historical data and trends.
I rely on Tiller mostly for transaction data from my bank accounts and auto-cat as inputs for my monthly analytics.
I have sheets with pivot tables summarizing my category spending each month. I also created a sheet which pulls all my category spend next to my monthly forecasted budget based on prior year (annual budgeting process) so I can see if I am ahead or behind for the month and forecasting annual sums.
In my case I want to also separate my wive’s accounts from mine by category for the above comparisons. I’ve tagged each transaction based on which account is used for myself and my wife (“owner”). Then with a pivot table can pull spending by “owner”.
So I simply review spending by category vs forecast each month and YTD by “owner”.
Nice work! Would you mind explaining what these sheets do and maybe share a copy? I feel like they could be useful to other users!
Yes…I will work on creating definitions for the custom tabs I referenced. I can also work on creating a de-identified version for sharing the custom tab configurations. If I succeed, what is the best way of sharing the custom tab configurations?
Donation tracker tab - pulls the category list from my charitable giving budget, the annual budget and ytd spending by category from the yearly budget tab. With this snapshot I can track how I am progressing v goal and can do some additional forecasting to help with eoy opportunity planning
retirement account balance tracker tab (emulated in a 529 account tab) - pulls in the linked accounts from my balances tab, starts with the balance as of 1/1/2026…updates with the current date balance when the balance tab refreshes, pulls any withdrawals from a retirement account from the transactions tab, then does a simple return % calculation (current balance - starting balance + ytd withdrawal activity)…close enough for jazz in comparing to the financial inst portal…then I note in other columns whether this is a managed account or a self managed account to determine if the spread is greater than the fees paid to manage the accounts (regularly review and report the delta with my financial advisor)…I use a day counter to be able to annualize the returns and also assign the accounts and the respective returns into the three buckets I manage in the portfolio (<3 yrs, 3-10 yrs, >10 yrs for projected need of the funds in the given account)
I also have a separate tab I call “ticker tracker” that uses GOOGLEFINANCE to pull in current market prices for every holding for every account linked in Tiller. I use this to track a 60/40 index fund baseline to compare its return with my managed account returns…and the current market price updates feed an additional investment decision tab that takes the current rate of return trend and its momentum and calculates a weighted decision score that yields a series of buy/hold recommendations (used AI tools to help refine the algorithm for this)…this is helpful for expediently making buy/hold decisions on self managed accounts and raising questions for my advisor for the managed accounts.
monthly funding model tab- takes from the balance tab the current balances from the accounts I want to use to fund month-to-month liquidity needs, from the yearly budget tab the forecast loss for future months that will need to be funded through account withdrawals, all keeping to your target emergency savings floor which drives when and if you need to make a withdrawal. The yield based on your assumptions is a schedule by month of what withdrawals you will need to initiate by account…which gets adjusted each month as you have actual new balance activity and your actual v budget P and L activity for a month. Claude helped me build this one.
I hope these use cases will help your brainstorming.
Yes, they seem interesting! Thank you!