How to Use Your Free Finance Tracker

So, you’ve decided you want to take charge of your finances instead of just hoping for the best each month.

The problem is that you have NO IDEA how or where to start.

Step one is, and always will be, to track your spending.

That’s why I created the free finance tracker, for folks that may not get some sick satisfaction from a well-designed excel spreadsheet.

Since you’re not one of those people, you probably ended up in the fetal position on the floor as soon as you opened your free finance tracker.

It’s okay. Come back. We will work through this together.

I’m here to show you, step by step, how to use your new finance tracker.

Let’s get started.

Why a Finance Tracker?

Step one to taking control of your finances is to track your spending. This is the hill I am prepared to die on.

Don’t shoot the messenger, but there is no way around it. You can’t figure out where to go if you have no idea where you are.

If you try to make changes without tracking your spending, you may end up making changes that have absolutely no impact. You might think that you need to cut back on eating out, when in reality you’re spending $500 a month on clothes.

Tracking your spending is also crucial to building a realistic budget. If you try to build a budget from scratch without knowing where you’re starting, you will get extremely overwhelmed and frustrated. That is the last thing we want.

My free finance tracker has not only helped folks learn how to save, but it has also helped me learned how to spend.

How to Use the Finance Tracker

The very first thing you want to do is save a copy of the tracker to your device. This will allow you to customize it however you need without losing any progress.

The tracker downloads as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. If you want to know how to transfer the Excel spreadsheet into a Numbers spreadsheet, click here. If you would like to turn the tracker into a Google Sheets Doc, click here.

Then once you get your tracker completely customized to your liking, you can save a new copy each month in order to keep an archive for the year.

To get the values for the tracker, you will have your bank statements in one hand and the tracker open in the other.

You will then go through all your statements – bank, credit card, PayPal, Venmo, etc – and go by day by day to document everything that came in and went out.

It sounds dramatic but every single moving penny should be accounted for. If it’s not, your numbers will be off.

Find the date and then find all the movement on that date, then move on to the next day, and then the next.

When documenting your expenses, do not round up or down. Document exactly what you see on your statement. That means if you spent $83.64 on something, you document $83.64 and not $84.

When to Use the Finance Tracker

Personally, I use my tracker on the first of each month to document expenses from the previous month. Since I’ve become accustomed to it, it only takes me about an hour to fill in everything.

One hour out of 720 average hours in a month is 0.1%. If you can find the time to binge watch that next episode of Bridgerton, you can find time to do this.

You are more than welcome to fill it in real time. So, as you make a purchase, document it. If I did mine this way, I feel like I would easily miss something. Sitting down and giving myself an hour to focus on nothing but my tracker ensures that I absolutely will not miss anything.

Income

The first table in the finance tracker is labeled “income.”

The very first column – labeled “Paycheck” – is just a column that numbers the different streams of income that come into your household every month.

Examples of income may be a full-time job, part-time job, rental income, child support, etc.

For this table, you would analyze your bank statements and enter the date and amount of any income for that month. The tracker is set to automatically sum everything in this table.

At the bottom, to the right of the word “total”, you will get a total income for the month.

You can also update these columns to say anything you want. For example, “paycheck” could become “income” and “income 1/2/3” could become “Personal income” or “Husband/Wife’s income”. Customize it in a way that makes sense and is easy to follow for you.

The easier it is to follow, the more likely you are to keep using it.

Fixed Expenses

We all have fixed expenses. To determine what those are, answer the question “if I didn’t do anything else this month, what would I still have to pay?”

For example, things like a mortgage, rent, electric, internet, student loans, car payment, etc.

Again, customize this to match your specific situation.

For example, I do not have a water bill, but I do have a Homeowner’s Association fee for my condo. In this case, I would replace “water” with “HOA Fee”.

Once that is all set, you will fill in the date when that bill is paid and the amount. The finance tracker will automatically sum all those expenses and give you a total amount.

Other expenses

Since most of us don’t just sit at home all month twiddling our thumbs, we have additional expenses.

The next table in the tracker captures these expenses.

The first column lists the days of the month, 1-31. If a month doesn’t have 31 days, then just fill in until the last day of the month.

The rest of the columns are for categorization. By default, the three most popular categories – groceries, gas, and restaurants – are already listed. You can add whatever categories make sense for you.

For example, maybe you have a project vehicle or are doing home renovations and want to know exactly what you’re spending on that every month.

Other examples of categories I’ve seen are:

• Pets
• Kid’s activities
• Books
• Subscriptions (Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, etc.)
• Travel

The last column is for everything else that may not fit into any category – that necklace you bought on Etsy or your foreign language class. This is the miscellaneous column.

Be careful not to get carried away with this column and make sure that you are really understanding everything that is going in there.

If you have a lot in your miscellaneous column, maybe you need to consider breaking some stuff out into a more specific column.

Maybe you need an “Etsy” category, I’m not going to tell you how to live your life.

Due to some fancy Excel magic, any cell in this table will change colors once it has a value in it. For those of us that are visual learners, the color changing cells make it easier to see where exactly you are spending the most money OR the most frequent money (not the same thing).

Note: PLEASE note that these features may not copy over to Google Sheets or Numbers. To correct the color changing magic, click here for Google Sheets and here for Numbers.

Another Note: If you have multiple expenses for the same category on the same date, just add them all into the same cell by double clicking the cell you want to type in and entering an equation like this:

=Expense 1+Expense 2+Expense 3

Then hit enter. The spreadsheet will automatically give you a total.

At the bottom of each category, there is a total for that category. All the way to the right of is a total sum of everything from this table.

The color changing cells will tell you where you most frequently spend money, the totals at the bottom will tell you where you spend the most overall. Those two things are not the same.

(This is probably an appropriate time to ask if the $5 you spend a day adds up to more than the $100 you spend once?)

If you are completely lost on how to categorize your spending, check out this helpful guide!

Leftover

The very last table in the tracker is your leftover. This is all the extra money you have leftover once you’ve deducted what you’ve spent from what you’ve earned.

The tracker is set to automatically pull the summation of all income as well as the summation of all the expense categories, both fixed expenses and other expenses. It will then subtract the total outcome from the total income to give you a leftover balance.

It is up to you to decide what to do with your leftover. You can break it down into pieces to pay off debt, build your savings, or put into some investments.

If you don’t have any leftover, all the data is already in front of you to tell you where you could make changes and cutbacks.

The Benefits of a Finance Tracker

The very first step to financial literacy and financial freedom is being able to track your spending. Without tracking your spending, you are simply guessing as to where your money is going.

If you try to make changes without tracking, you won’t know if those changes are actually having an impact.

In order to create a budget, you need to have a realistic idea of what you are currently spending. After a minimum of three months tracking your spending, then you can get a realistic average on what you are spending on groceries, gas, eating out, etc. and build a budget from there.

To most people, I’m sure this is tedious and extremely boring but believe me when I say that it is absolutely necessary to getting your finances on track.

I will repeat what I said in the beginning: there is no way around it.

You won’t know that you went to Wawa (east coast girl here) 23 times last month until it is staring you in the face. You won’t know how spending $5 a day adds up until you see the total at the bottom.

Do this for a minimum of three months, then you can start to make realistic and sustainable changes.

And remember, getting your finances under control won’t happen overnight. Step one is often the most uncomfortable one to take and you’ve already started that one! Pat yourself on that back for that!

After you’ve filled out your finance tracker, can you leave me a comment letting me know what you liked or didn’t like about it? I am curious to hear your thoughts so I can improve this free finance tracker for other people!

Happy tracking everyone!