Excel Budget Table: Advantages & Disadvantages

Managing your budget

The solution to better manage your estimated budget and reduce expenses is to create an excel budget table to do your accounts. The excel budget allows you to precisely monitor your cash inflows and outflows. The result: a version that controls costs thanks to an annual summary.

It also makes it possible to categorize these expenses, identify major items and save money. These savings will allow you to invest this money and build up a wealth. Keeping a budget is one of the pillars of wealth management.

What is an excel budget table?

The excel budget table allows you to track your monthly expenses (or fixed charges) accurately. By creating a budget table, you will be able to add your expenses, categorize them and make statistics on your expenses. If you want to monitor your entire wealth, we recommend using a Excel heritage in its free version.

Whether it's school supplies, groceries or a Netflix subscription, you can write them all into your excel budget table. It is strongly recommended to establish a monthly budget in order to control your expenses and avoid being overdrawn. Large families or single people, a monthly budget table can be useful for everyone!

There are several Excel budget table formats:

• Wealth management software: we don't necessarily think about it, but the wealth management software can be an excellent way to monitor your estimated budget precisely in parallel with all of your assets.
• The family budget table pdf: Once printed, you can enter your income and expenses. This Excel chart to do your accounts can be displayed on your fridge and filled out by the whole family. Its limit: you will have to calculate the total head expenses.
• The simple family budget table: this rather special format of the Excel Budget table is simply a monthly table with one column per family member and one row for each day of the month. So, in the blink of an eye on the simple family budget table, you will know where you are in terms of expenses for the month.
• Excel family budget management software: using software can be an easy solution to easily track your budget. It is quite easy to use: you manually add your income and expenses to your budget table. The software will take care of calculating the expenses for you by month, by category or by person.
• Blank monthly budget chart: starting with a blank monthly budget table makes it possible to avoid having to create a table from scratch. There are numerous Excel table templates (like XLSasset) available for free online.
• Bank account excel table: this table allows you to have a summary of your various bank accounts (BNP, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole,...) in one and the same place. The bank account excel table is particularly useful if you have several personal accounts or if your family is a customer of several banks.
• Excel monthly budget table: as its name suggests, this Excel budget is organized by month. Indeed, there can be significant variations in your spending from one month to the next, and this will have a significant effect on your personal finances. The monthly budget excel table will make it possible to identify the most expensive months and to take the necessary measures to reduce your cash outflows.

How to make an excel budget table?

If you're looking for an excel budget template, you've come to the right place!

We are going to explain to you precisely how to create a tailor-made table for your family budget. The phase of creating the excel table to do your accounts is extremely important. We also advise you to start with an Excel budget model and not to create your own from scratch, you will save precious time! Here is the first rule: the Excel budget table should be divided into two main categories: income and expenses.

The “income” category of your monthly Excel budget allows you to list all the cash inflows from which you will benefit: salaries, passive income, rental income, family allowances, one-off income... If you are in a relationship, it is important to add the income of the entire household to the excel budget table.

Now, let's look at the “expenses” category. They are divided into 3 main categories:

• fixed expenses: essential expenses that you make every month. These incompressible costs are also called fixed expenses.
• variable expenses: these expenses are made regularly but their amount changes from one month to the next.
• occasional expenses: these are exceptional expenses.

In order to be able to establish accurate and useful statistics, it is important to create different subcategories. They will allow you to monitor your expenditure items to the nearest euro, and thus identify potential savings.

Expenses

• Rent
• Loans: monthly payments (with insurance)
• Savings: recurring investments
• Insurance: home insurance, car insurance, civil liability,...
• Mutual
• Electricity (EDF)
• Bank fees: bank card, movement fees,...
• Taxes: income taxes, local taxes, housing tax,...
• Transport: subway, bike, train subscription
• Internet subscription
• Telephone subscription (fixed and mobile)
• Hobbies: Netflix, Spotify

Variable expenses

• Food and shopping
• Outings (cinema, concerts)
• Vacances
• ATM withdrawals
• Others (hairdresser, doctor, etc.)

Occasional expenses:

• Various purchases: furniture, household appliances
• Repairs: home, car, house

Adding the three categories into your budget excel table will give you the total of your expenses for the month. Thus, you will see the distribution between these 3 main categories. Fixed costs must be limited to the strict minimum. If you want to save more, you'll need to cut back on your occasional expenses first. Then, you can analyze your variable expenses in detail. Thanks to the subcategories, you will know precisely the weight of each line in your family budget. This work will serve as the basis for your estimated budget.

What are the advantages of an excel budget table?

The advantages of the budget table are numerous. First of all, it allows you to rigorously monitor your expenses month after month and to make sure you don't get out of hand. This will allow you to save more each month and therefore to invest this surplus in financial investments such as shares or SCPIs.

If you are married and have children, a pdf family budget table will track the income for each member of the household. This way, you will have a precise view of each expense item. The objective is not to track your expenses to the nearest euro, but to understand the main categories of expenses and to identify the savings you could make.

Finally, the table will give you a very important granularity in your income and expenditure analyses. This is essential if you want to dissect your budget in order to limit your outflow of money.

Should we favor the free version of an Excel wealth table or the numerous paid versions? The choice depends entirely on your budget. The advantage of a paid version is that you have access to more advanced features as well as responsive customer support.

What are the alternatives to the Excel Budget table?

We identified several alternatives to the Excel Budget table. Good news, most of them are completely free!

• Finary: Finary is the best application to manage your budget for free. Finary replaces your excel budget table: 100% online, real-time monitoring, automatic categorization... Just connect your bank accounts and Finary takes care of the rest. Finary is not just a budget management application, it allows you to monitor all of your assets.
• Budget management application: There are a multitude of budget management applications on the market: Bankin, Linxo, Budgea. In general, the budget management application costs nothing in its free version. The premium version, with more features, is paid and costs on average between €5 and €10 per month.
• Your bank application: Some bank mobile applications allow you to automatically categorize your fixed and variable expenses and thus obtain detailed analyses of your budget. On the other hand, if you have several banks, your visibility will be limited and a bank account excel table will be more effective.

How much does an Excel budget table cost?

The ideal is to use Finary. The solution is 100% free and allows you to monitor your entire budget automatically online. No need for special knowledge in Excel or to download an Excel table, everything is done automatically. Simply sync your bank accounts and Finary takes care of the rest.

How do I create an account table in Excel?

Here is the best way to create an account chart in Excel in just a few clicks:

1. Open the Excel software and the following titles in the columns: date in A1, expense or income in B1, amount in C1, comment in D4
2. Format the columns so you can easily make formulas: date for A1, text for B1, euro for C1, and text for D4.
3. Then, do a pivot table on a second sheet. This will allow you to add up income and expenses

If you prefer to use an online and 100% free solution, create your budget table on Finary.

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