Manage Your Finances with Spreadsheet, the EASY Way!

One of the largest differences between my life at University versus high school is my own financial independence. I am immensely blessed to have been able to keep my job throughout all of covid, which has helped pay for everything I call my own, from my tuition to my Thunderbolt online casino pasttime to the laptop I’m currently writing this on. While arguably the hardest part about finances is acquiring them, the other half of the battle is managing those finances once you do have them in hand.

In my case, I have to pay off University costs, food, and rent, plus I’m in charge of ensuring that my roommates all pay their share of the rent (they pay me, and I pay the landlord). So how do I keep this all under control without driving myself crazy? The answer is that I use tools. Or, in this case, one specific tool that keeps track of my most important financial expenditures: Spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are an immensely powerful tool for keeping track of data. Every company on the planet uses spreadsheets in relation to their finances in one way or the other, and you should too. A lot of people also don’t realize just how much power exists within most spreadsheet applications.

Speaking of which, which spreadsheet application should you be using? The most popular, by far, is Microsoft Excel. Excel has several distinct advantages over its competitors. The first is that it is powerful. It’s got hundreds, if not thousands, of tools and functions buried within that only the most involved of data analysts know the ins and outs of.

Second, it’s designed to be compatible with the Microsoft suite, so Excel by default has features that can be taken advantage of by other Microsoft products, such as Word or Teams.

A similar but open-source spreadsheet application is LibreOffice Calc, and unless you need some specific, high-end features offered by Excel, it’ll likely suit all of your needs. Oh, did I mention that the entire LibreOffice suite is completely free? No subscriptions, no authentication keys, no microtransactions.

The third application, and the one that I’m going to delve into later on in this article, is Google Sheets. This one has some pretty distinct advantages and disadvantages that make using it a trade-off. While Google Sheets are completely free, they do require a Google account and an internet connection to be able to access it.

This is because Google Sheets are all stored on the cloud (Google Drive), and if you have a slow internet connection, the latency (or “lag”) will drive you up the wall. However, because they are on the cloud, your Google Sheets will be available to you on any computer with a browser and an internet connection, and can with a few clicks, be easily made accessible to other Google Accounts.

Such as, say, a trio of roommates with whom you want to keep all of the finances transparent.

Identify the Purpose

One of the most fundamental pieces of business advice is, “Figure out your USP”. USP stands for Unique Selling Point, and the idea is that when you make a product, you need to figure out what makes YOUR product so special that people should buy it over your competitors.

I have found that you can apply a similar sort of logic when it comes to making spreadsheets. My spreadsheets have a specific purpose and contain the specific information I need to make smart financial decisions every month.

For instance, I have a spreadsheet called “Apartment Ledger,” which I use to track rent payments. I decided that I needed to keep track of whether or not my roommates had paid me, whether or not my landlord had been paid by me, how much I earned that month, and how much was leftover. Since I have a signed lease, I know exactly how many months I need to keep track of, I know exactly how much I need to get paid already, and I know exactly how much my roommates need to pay.

My column headers look something like this:

Date – My Income  – Roommate 1  – Roommate 2  – Expenses

With all the appropriate information filled in to each column, the rest is fairly simple. With some basic functions, it ain’tnuthin’ but a thang to add up our total cash pool and subtract the rent. The result is my monthly net income that I can spend on everything else, which is pretty darn useful. Also, if any slot is left as “zero”, that means I need to grab my baseball bat and kick in some doors- er, I mean, it means that someone hasn’t paid yet. Useful!

Take Your Spreadsheets to the Next Level

However, I have found that tools are only as useful if you’re willing to use them. So adding some quality of life features to really enhance your overall workflow can make all the difference.

I have definitely gotten way too overenthusiastic in this department, though, and spent ages making things pretty when my time could have been better invested in something else- say, meeting the deadline for some articles that I have to submit… the point is, make your best judgment.

The most simple of such quality of life features is the ability to do math automatically. Addition, subtraction, multiplication – it doesn’t matter. The more advanced sort of mathematics can be found in functions, like exponents and logarithms.

Then there are other features that can be useful, depending on your use case. I considered using Google Sheets’ currency conversion to automatically convert my income (which is in USD) to my local currency before adding it into what my roommates have paid. Which I did.

Then I realized that I have to convert my income to my local currency anyway as I pass it to my bank account, which takes out a five-dollar fee – so not only is my total different, it’s just easier to insert my income in local currency directly. Still, it’s possible, and other different circumstances that could have been a great shortcut for working with conversions and all that.

More aesthetically, however, are checkboxes. In my spreadsheet, I have a column of checkboxes to mark whether or not that month’s rent has been paid yet. It’s simple, elegant, and can be updated via my phone with simple taps.

However, to go the extra mile, I also applied conditional formatting to the column of checkboxes. To access this feature, right click on a cell or a selection of cells, hover over “view more cell actions”, and click “conditional formatting”. This opens a sidebar that allows you to apply a wide variety of formatting rules to your spreadsheet.

I went with a very simple one. If the value of the cells containing the checkboxes were true (meaning that the checkbox was checked off), then I have the cell turn green. Otherwise, the cell is red. This is a great visual way of emphasizing this information, which is otherwise just part of a wall of text and numbers.

To go even further beyond!

So, to go the extra extra mile, you can also set up custom scripts to perform even more complex actions within your spreadsheet. To do this, you first need to create a drawing. This can be a simple rectangle with some text on it, or you can import an image- it doesn’t matter. Once it’s in the spreadsheet, you can right-click it and then left-click the three verticle dots in the top right corner of your image. This will open another menu, and you want to click “assign script”.

To make the script itself, you can find “app scripts” under “Extensions > App Scripts” at the top of the spreadsheet. This will open up a text editor, which will allow you to code with Google Script. You’ll have access to all sorts of useful functions and features that performing in the spreadsheet itself would have otherwise been difficult, if not impossible.

For instance, I wanted the ability to press a button and add a value to the next available cell in a column without having to scroll all the way down every time. So I made a button and gave it a script that would prompt me for a value. The script would take that value and then search the column for the next empty cell. Once it has found it, the cell is filled, and voila! Zero scrolling required.

Conclusion

So, all in all, managing finances has been, for me, all about investment. I invest time in one area to save me time and / or money in another area. One of those areas is the spreadsheet. Making a nice and slick spreadsheet has really kept me on top of things, and the best part is, I only need to insert values once a month. Of course, your needs can (and probably do) differ from mine. You can make a sheet for general expenses or keeping track of what homework you have left to do – it doesn’t matter! A good spreadsheet is made for you, by you.

Or you can download a template made by someone who already knows what they’re doing. Hey, I never said you have to reinvent the wheel, did I?