I am trying to understand the difference of the categories on the Yearly Budget spreadsheet. What does each mean, Budget, actual and available. Why is my available category adding my Budget and actual numbers together
Good morning!
Here’s a great Tiller video that shows how the Foundation Template works. It includes ideas on the Yearly Budget sheet.
And here is a really helpful Tiller article that explains more about budgeting.
This is a great tool. It shows how your spending or saving compares to your plan for each month and then for the year overall.
The numbers in the Budget columns come from your Categories sheet (Change a number there, it shows up here. Don’t change the budget numbers on the Yearly Budget sheet. :). This is what your plan is for each category and in each month.
The Actual number for each month is coming from your Transactions sheet. This is the sum of the transactions that you have assigned to each category in each month. Add more transactions within that category and values in the Actual columns change.
The Available number is the comparison of Budget to Actual. It is showing what you have left in each category in each month after the transaction activity is applied to the Budget for the month.
So, for example, if you planned to spend $100 on gas for your car in May, the number in the Budget column for May would be $100. If you have two transactions in May categorized as gas, one for $30 and one for $10, then the number in the Actual column for May would show the sum of those two at $40.
The number in the Available column for May is the result…the comparison of the Actual to the Budget to show what you have left, in this case, $100 (May’s Budget)-$40 (May’s Actual) = $60 (May’s Available).
You’ve noticed that there is a set of three columns (Budget, Actual, and Available) for each month. Then all the way over to the left, is the sum of all the month’s activity and budgets for the months…a picture of where you stand, year-to-date.
Does that make sense?
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