Are you looking for free money management software? It has long been my goal to create a simple, macro-free, money management spreadsheet that provides the same functionality as basic budgeting and money management software. A simple spreadsheet will never do everything that dedicated software can do, but the new Vertex42® Money Management Template comes amazingly close.
Basic money management consists of 3 cyclical steps: PLAN, TRACK and ANALYZE. The money manager spreadsheet evolved from the combination of my budget planner, checkbook register, and monthly budget templates. These 3 tools together provide a way to Plan, Track and Analyze your income and spending.
As a preliminary caution, you should be comfortable using a spreadsheet and understand that spreadsheets are somewhat error-prone. Even if the spreadsheet is completely free of errors at the time you download it, there is no guarantee that you won’t accidentally introduce errors as you edit it. With that said, download and enjoy!.
This new version has all of the features of the original money manager below, including monthly and yearly reports. However, it is a LOT easier to customize budget categories. It was designed to be something simple for students to begin using as they leave home and start having to track their own finances.
- I have added a new Weekly budget report worksheet. This worksheet lets you define a separate weekly or biweekly budget and will compare your budget to your actual spending. The main budget worksheet is still monthly, but now you have both options.
- To allow more categories, I have added 50 expense and 20 income categories, but hid those rows by default. So, if you need more categories, unhide the hidden rows.
Both this older version and the newer version can be used as a complete money management system. With a single spreadsheet you can Plan, Track, and Analyze your personal or family spending.
- Create a Yearly Budget to make future projections, handle variable income, plan for irregular expenses (non-monthly), and budget variable expenses like seasonal electricity or water bills.
- Record Transactions for multiple accounts all in a single worksheet. Include your Credit Card account(s), Checking account(s), Savings account(s), and even an account to represent your Cash, Purse, or Wallet.
- Balance Your Checkbook – the Transaction history table includes a “Cleared Balance” that makes it easy to compare to your bank statement(s). Use the reconcile (R) column in the table to enter cleared “c” and reconciled “R” transactions. You can enter split transactions and transfers between accounts. Use the built-in Excel autofiltering to display transactions for a single account or all accounts.
- Track Your Monthly Spending using the monthly budget report which includes graphs, compares budget vs. actual amounts, and is updated automatically as you enter transactions. Just change the Year and Month to view the report for a different month.
- Track Your Yearly Spending [Excel 2010 version only] [Update 9/2/2014] – Due to frequent requests for a yearly report, I have added a new worksheet that calculates an Income & Expense Report for an entire year grouped by month. This may be helpful for creating the following year’s budget.
We’ve created a Weekly Budget template that is based on the money manager. It includes the transactions and the weekly report all on one worksheet.
Update (XLSX version only): A separate “Accounts” worksheet was added for editing the list of accounts and summarizing the balances in each account. A new “Tags” column was added to the Transactions worksheet to let you add your own unique tags as needed. For example, tags would allow you to filter or search for specific expenses that might cross over multiple categories, such as a #CAR1 or #CAR2 tag for tracking expenses associated with a specific vehicle.
