I personally set this up as a multiple-choice question and included all of my buckets as answer choices. Question 1 should be Buckets (question titles don’t matter). This one-time task is then completed and you will not have to do that again. Setup to Use a Google Form to Track Expensesįinally, copy them using Ctrl+C, then highlight columns H through AT (all the way to the right) and Ctrl+V to paste. Feel free to skip to the “Conclusion” section. If you’re not using a form, that’s the end of this guide. Budget as described in the above section.
In the “Activity” column, set them all to 0, and update when you have expenses. Essentially, each following month’s funds should be your income in that month + any leftover from last month (which, for January, would be the sum of F1, F2, and F3). To update the income in February, you would change the number in cell I1 to =+F1+F2+F3. In F1, left of “Funds for Jan,” input your income. If a month passes and you don’t want to see it anymore, you can “hide” it by highlighting that month’s columns, right-clicking on the column headers, and selecting “hide columns.” Using It Without a Google Form It’s also simple to borrow money from one budget category to cover expenses in another by subtracting from the budget column in one bucket and adding the difference to another column. With that income, you will go into the Budget column for the month you want to put that money and simply change the cell value. Your income will be populated either with or without a google form (both sets of instructions below). the tracker starts with January 2021 in columns E:G, but if you’re starting later, simply change the date in cell E5. If you want to add new buckets, re-check (Blanks) in the filter and add them into a blank row. This will clean up your YNAB tab and hide blank values. When you’ve adjusted all of the buckets in the YNAB v2 tab, click on the little filter button next to CATEGORY in cell A6 and uncheck the box for (Blanks). You can do this by double-clicking on the cells in column A and editing the existing names and adding new ones. The first step is to edit the budget categories so they work for your life. My recommendation is to use my YNAB tracker with a Google Form, which you can bookmark on your phone and computer and easily pull up to log expenses and income as they occur.
This spreadsheet requires manual tracking, but I’ve tried to make that as painless as possible using the instructions below. I’ll say upfront that it does not support automated transactions. There are a few ways you can use my spreadsheet.