Introducing the Vertex42 Money Management Template

@Tom – At first I thought you meant real envelopes, which could be treated like you say – as separate accounts. But it sounds like you are wanting to track the balance of specific budget categories by essentially creating sub-accounts (i.e. “envelopes”) for your checking or savings accounts. That is actually a great way to track savings goals and money you’re saving for irregular expenses.

It turns out there is a simple way to handle this using the money management spreadsheet. First, recognize that the Transaction History worksheet is a way to track the balance of multiple accounts. You could think of the overall BALANCE as the master account, and the Account Balance column being the balance of the sub-accounts (i.e. your “envelopes”). So, the solution would be to make a copy of the Transaction worksheet, and then make a few changes:

1. Copy the Transactions worksheet (Right-click on the Transactions tab, select “Move or Copy…”, then check the “Create a copy” box) and rename the new one “Envelopes” or “Savings”. You can do whatever you want with this new worksheet without affecting the rest of the money management spreadsheet.
2. Select the cells in the Account column and change the Data Validation from =accounts to =categories (Data > Data Validation > Source:). This will allow you to select your budget categories from a drop-down list. 3. You may want to change the “Account” label to “Envelope”. You could of course remove the data validation altogether.
4. With those cells still selected, remove the conditional formatting (Format > Conditional Formatting > Delete).
5. Remove other columns you might not need, such as Num, R, the hidden columns, and Cleared Balance.

If you create a separate sheet for your Savings account, then the overall balance in your new sheet could be compared against the total Savings balance in the Transactions sheet. The downside to this approach is that you end up recording transactions in a couple of places.

I’m not sure if this approach would be more convenient than using the separate Savings Goal Tracker and Expense Tracker worksheets or not, but it’s certainly an interesting alternative.

Hi Mandy, you have a “Clothing” category under both Daily Living and Children, but each category name needs to be unique. You could label the second one “Kid Clothing” to make it different from the “Clothing” category under Daily Living.

@Mary … Yes, the Transactions worksheet let’s you see the current and cleared balances for each separate account. The Report worksheet shows what you have earned and spent … but not what the current balances are.

For problems like this, please contact me via email. If you send me a copy of your modified spreadsheet and let me know what version of Excel you are using and more details, I can usually figure out the problem.

@Christopher: The key is to realize that the Category column in the Transactions worksheet determines what amounts are included in the Report – it doesn’t matter what account it came out of. If you enter “[Transfer]” in the Category column (or leave it blank), that amount won’t show up in the budget report.

Ideally, if you had been saving up for a large purchase over time using the Savings as an Expense technique, you would have created a “Baby Equipment Fund” as a sub-category under Savings. Then, any time you contributed to this fund via a transfer from checking to savings (as in the example given in the Help worksheet), it would show up in your budget report as a payment to “Baby Equipment Fund”.

So now, let’s say that you’ve reached your savings goal and are able to buy the baby equipment. You’ve saved $500 and according to your budget, that amount has already been spent (as payments to your “baby equipment fund”). But of course, the money is still in your Savings account. To record the payment, enter the transaction as a Payment from your Savings account, but leave the Category blank, and enter a note in the Memo column like “payment from Baby Equipment Fund”. That way, your Savings balance will remain accurate, but it won’t show up in your report. I use a separate Savings Goal spreadsheet to track the balances in my savings account.

Also if I use money from income account “gift received” is it better to charge “gift received” or the category.

If you lump in your “gift received” money with the rest of your budget, you could use a spending category such as “Discretionary” to record payments made with gift money (that’s the way I do it). However, if you spend the gift money on something for which you had already been budgeting, such as clothing, record the payment using the “Clothing” category. Then, you could use the money you saved (by not having to pay for the clothes with your wages) to make an extra payment to savings or debt reduction. Sometimes it depends on the request of the gift giver, though. If they told you the gift was for X, you should probably spend it on X.