How to Create a Budget Tracker in Google Sheets

Tired of wondering where your money goes each month after you get paid? Taking control of your finances is simpler than you think, and the perfect tool is probably already open in another browser tab: Google Sheets. This guide will walk you through building a powerful, personal budget tracker from scratch. You'll learn how to log your spending, automatically calculate your totals, and visualize your financial habits to see exactly what's happening with your finances.

First, Set Up Your Google Sheets Workspace

Before we dive into formulas and charts, let's lay the groundwork. A good structure makes your budget tracker easier to use and maintain. We'll set up three separate tabs (or "sheets") within your main Google Sheets file.

Start by opening a new, blank Google Sheet. You'll see one sheet at the bottom named "Sheet1." Rename this and add two more so you have the following:

• Transactions: This will be your master list for logging every single penny that comes in or goes out.
• Configuration: This is where we'll list out your budget categories and income sources, keeping things organized.
• Dashboard: This is the fun part. It will be your command center, summarizing your spending and showing your progress at a glance.

To rename a sheet, simply double-click its name at the bottom of the screen. To add a new sheet, click the "+" icon.

Step 1: Define Your Categories and Set Your Budget

A good budget starts with knowing where your money is supposed to go. In your Configuration sheet, we'll build a simple reference that will power the rest of your tracker.

1. Create an Expense Categories Table

In the Configuration sheet, create two columns with these headers in cells A1 and B1:

• Expense Category
• Monthly Budget

Now, list all of your regular expenses under these headings. Be as specific or as broad as you like, but starting simple is often best. Here's an example:

• Rent/Mortgage
• Groceries
• Utilities
• Gas/Transportation
• Subscriptions (Netflix, Spotify, etc.)
• Takeout & Restaurants
• Entertainment
• Shopping

Next to each category, enter your budgeted monthly amount. This is your best guess at what you plan to spend. If you're not sure, look back at your last couple of bank statements.

2. Create an Income Sources Table

In the same sheet, find an empty space (like column D) and create a similar table for your income sources:

• Income Source
• Monthly Income

Here you can list your "Paycheck," "Side Hustle," "Freelance," or whatever ways you bring in money. Fill in the expected amount for each.

This simple configuration step does more than just list numbers, it creates a structured database that Google Sheets can reference for formulas and dropdowns, making everything else automated.

Step 2: Start Logging Your Transactions with Data Validation

This is where the day-to-day action happens. Switch over to your Transactions sheet and set up the following columns in row 1:

• Date (in column A)
• Description (in column B)
• Category (in column C)
• Amount (in column D)

To make logging fast and error-free, we'll turn the "Category" column into a dropdown menu that pulls directly from your configuration list. This is a game-changer because it prevents typos, which can break your formulas.

How to Create a Dropdown Menu:

1. Click on the header of column C to select the entire column, minus the header cell. (so, click the box with "C" in it).
2. In the menu, go to Data > Data validation.
3. In the "Criteria" dropdown, select "Dropdown (from a range)".
4. Click the small grid icon next to the text box.
5. Switch to your Configuration sheet and select all of your income and all of your expense categories. The formula should look something like this: Configuration!A2:A10,Configuration!D2:D3. Hit Enter once done to apply.
6. Click the Done button.

Now, when you click on any cell in the Category column, a dropdown arrow will appear, giving you a perfect list of your pre-defined categories. Your data will always be clean and consistent!

Step 3: Build Your Interactive Budget Dashboard

Okay, it's time to see the results. Navigate to your clean Dashboard sheet. This is where we'll summarize all the data you're logging in the Transactions sheet using a few key formulas.

Creating the Expenses Summary Table

First, let's build a table to see how your spending stacks up against your budget. Set it up with these four column headers:

• Category
• Budgeted
• Spent
• Remaining

1. Automatically Pull in Your Categories and Budgeted Amounts

In the "Category" column, you can simply copy and paste your list of expense categories from the Configuration sheet.

Next to each category, paste in the budgeted amount from the Configuration sheet.

2. Calculate Actual Spending with SUMIF

Now, let's have Google Sheets calculate how much you've spent in each category. In the first cell of your "Spent" column (let's assume it's C2), enter this formula:

=SUMIF(Transactions!$C:$C, A2, Transactions!$D:$D)

Let's break that down:

• SUMIF(...) is a function that says, "add up numbers if they meet a specific condition."
• Transactions!$C:$C is the range where the condition could be found, or in other words, your category on the tab we want Google Sheet to get that info.
• A2 is the criteria it is looking for. So, this search will only pull items under the right category.
• Transactions!$D:$D is if the condition is met, then the value of all of the items from that column is pulled from all of the transactions of that same category, providing the sum of total spent.

Drag the small blue dot in the corner of cell C2 all the way down to apply this formula to your other categories. The cell reference A2 will automatically update to A3, A4, and so on, making it dynamic!

3. Calculate Remaining Budget and Apply Formatting

In the "Remaining" column (D2), enter a simple subtraction formula:

=B2-C2

Drag this formula down the column. This gives you an immediate look at how much you have left to spend in each area.

Now for a useful visual cue: conditional formatting. This will turn rows red when you're over budget!

1. Select your entire "Remaining" data range (e.g., D2:D10).
2. Go to Format > Conditional formatting.
3. Format cells that are "less than" 0 as red.

Now, any negative number in that column will instantly highlight red, giving you a clear warning sign.

Creating a Financial Summary Box

Above your expenses table, it's helpful to have a main summary of your finances. This simple box gives you the big picture without needing to scan every row. In any blank area of the dashboard, layout the following labels to give all the overall information in one place:

• Total Budget
• Spent so far
• Left this month
• To calculate Total Budget, just add all of the budgets per category from your configuration tab.
• For total spending, add all transactions from the Transactions sheet.
• Then calculate the amount you still have available to spend from your budget.

How Can Visualizing Your Budget with Charts Help?

Lastly, no dashboard is complete without some charts so you can see your data not just on paper but in two dimensions or three, giving it more life. Pie charts and doughnut charts work well when you want to show how the expenses split out, bar charts can work better at showing you how your actual expense for each category stacks up against how much you planned to spend!

Build a Category Spending Pie Chart

1. Select only the two columns of categories and their spent amounts on the dashboard tab.
2. Go to Insert > Chart.
3. Google should be smart enough to know you're planning to do something with the two selected data ranges and should choose a pie chart, if not, you can change it yourself.
4. You can customize it in the chart editor for colors and labels.

Top Tips on Making Your Budget Tracker Work as it Should for Maximum Result

• Update It Regularly! This might be obvious, but your new system can't show where the money goes if you're not telling it where the money went. Set aside at least 15 minutes a week to input everything into the tracker. Use the Google Sheet mobile app if you get behind so you can update at any point, on the go!
• Begin With a Basic Budget The most important thing now that you have a system to help with your finances is to take control once and for all! You don't need a hundred different budget categories. Keep it simple! You can always make more as you need them, but start slowly with this first and grow/add as you need them.
• Adjust After Month-end, if Need-Be Once your month is over, look at where the money's gone, and if it makes more sense to set your budget more fairly across all expenses, you can!

Finishing Up

By following our tutorial from scratch with Google Sheets, you own more than a pretty spreadsheet, you own insight, which is something you never had before when it came to money. You just need to update it regularly, and you soon will understand your own financial habits and what to do to save more money and be in control, as you should be!

Gaining your financial freedom starts right here! Although Google's sheet will help your personal budget, you can easily find yourself in data overwhelm when you have different sales and marketing platform data (Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics, etc.). To solve this, we created Graphed that is built as your personal analyst who connects to all your business tools and helps you create real-time dashboards without any formulas!

By setting up a proper tracker in Google Sheets and using our helpful and in-depth guides, you now have the tools you need to better your financial situation. You have a newfound system that helps you understand your financial habits, so you make smarter financial decisions in the future. No matter where you decide to start on your financial journey, you should strive for clarity every step of the way, which is what you will achieve with this tracker and system to follow.

When you build it, you'll feel it - it's more than a set of numbers, it's more like a way to get more control in the one area of life you felt you needed help. Now that we have done the tracker, you're on your way to the financial future you've always hoped for.

Final Thoughts

Congratulations on building a flexible and dynamic Google Sheets budgeting tracker from start to finish! With that newly founded system in place, you've got everything you need to understand your financial habits and how that translates to your financial future. Having a system that can adapt with you and not stay the same all the time will be a great advantage. This system will help you make better choices when it comes to your finances. And the best part about it is that it's free! All of our templates and guides are available to you, so enjoy them.

When you're building your Google Sheet budget tracker, the experience may remind you of the same feelings you have with your day job - having to manually pull data from different systems like Google Analytics or your Facebook Ads, trying to make sense of the data in one single report. That manual reporting is exactly the reason we built our product, and it is called Graphed.