Set up a budget in Microsoft Office Excel

Matthew Hanson | News | 15/07/2010 14:54pm
One Comment

Don’t be put off by the thought of diving into dull sounding spreadsheets – Microsoft Office Excel can help get your finances in order and save a small fortune. One of the best ways to save money is to create a budget. By comparing your household income against your expenditure, you can successfully highlight areas where you might need to tighten your belt if your outgoings turn out to be more than your income. If your income is more than your expenditure, however, you could look at ways to increase or save the surplus in a savings account. The great thing about Office Excel is that it can do all the complicated sums in the background and display the results in an easy-to-read table. All you need to do is enter in the values and then identify where you need to make savings. And thanks to ready-made templates, all the hard work has already been done for you!

Step-by-step: Create a budget in Office Excel

1 Browse budget templates
Rather than going through the complicated process of creating your own budget template from scratch, you can download a ready-made Excel template. Go to the Microsoft Office website at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates. Click the Budgets link in the Browse templates section.

2 Select the template
Each template has a small preview that you can use to see how your budget will look. You can also see which version of Office Excel the template is compatible with, plus each template is given a star rating from other people who have used it. Click the name of the template you want for an overview.

3 Save the template
Once you’ve chosen a template, click Download. We’re using the Family monthly budget planner template, which can be downloaded from http://snipurl.com/v69j0, but you can use any template you like. After clicking Download you’re asked to save the template in the default Templates folder. Click Save.

4 View the template and change the currency
Once you have saved the template, Office Excel opens it automatically. Some templates have been formatted to give the results in US dollars. To change this to pounds, select the whole spreadsheet by clicking Ctrl and A on your keyboard, then click Accounting number format ➜ £ English.

5 Enter in your information
You can now enter your data. For example, in the Mortgage or rent row, put the cost in the Projected Cost column. At the end of the month, put the actual cost in the Actual Cost column. Do the same for all rows – if there are any that are not applicable, ignore them or change the name to something more suitable.

6 Review your results
At the end of the month, enter actual costs. Excel displays the difference between what you budgeted for, and what you spent. If the differences are in negative figures, you overspent. Think about why you spent more, and alter next month’s budget. The Actual Balance shows how much is left after expenses.

7 Get budgeting
There you have it. As long as you get into the habit of filling in the budget at the beginning and end of each month, you’ll find that balancing your finances can be pretty easy. You get peace of mind that your spending is under control, and you’ll be able to save money to treat yourself and your family.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 2:54 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.