Keeping Track Of Finances: Excel Budgeting Software

admin — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:49:26 +0000

Keeping Track Of Finances: Excel Budgeting Software

The Importance Of Keeping Track Of Your Finances

Just about any financial expert will tell you that keeping track of your finances is an absolute requirement if you want to manage your money effectively. Similarly, there are probably hundreds of personal finance blogs out there and the bloggers who operate them will tell you the same thing: you have to take control of your finances. Both groups will stress the advantages of budgeting and the importance of saving money, among other things. Yet it seems that people need to view the bigger picture in order to understand just how those concepts fit into their financial picture.

Keeping track of your income is easy, at least for most people. The overwhelming majority of people out there have just one source of income, and a few have two. Only a select few have three or more. So the focus isn’t usually on keeping track of the income; instead, it’s more about keeping track of the expenses. And this is where making a budget shows up yet again. The truth is, keeping track of expenses is boring at best, and panic-inducing at worst.

In trying to keep things as straight to the point as possible, you have to realize that simply making and spending money is not the same as managing your finances. In reality, while most people (including yours truly) are good spenders, learning how to manage the money we have is a skill that most of us have to learn, most of the time through trial and (costly) error. The result of that, of course, is that we end up carrying excessive levels of credit card debt, which in turn leaves us with less and less disposable income as we have to dedicate an increasingly larger portion of our income towards making debt payments.

The key advantage in tracking your finances is that it enables you to keep a very accurate eye on the status of your financial health. It will definitely help you with budgeting and filing taxes, just to name those two. Over time, you can also use it for comparison purposes, for your income, expenses, and investments. You know exactly where your money goes, as opposed to trying to guess where it all went. It gives you a great understanding of your financial situation and allows you to do necessary financial planning so you can see where you stand in regards to your financial goals.

A great way to keep track of your finances is through Microsoft Excel and the many budgeting software options that come for it.

Excel Budgeting Software

Excel budget spreadsheets are usually free to download. Technically, they’re not really software but rather add-ons, but some of them have some great functionality for organizing your budget information. Plus, using Excel budgeting software offers the following advantages:

Free – Well as long as you own Excel, setting up your budget with it is free

Easy to set up – Learning a couple of quick formulas is all you need to be able to make your numbers automatically add up, multiply, subtract, and divide when and where you need them to.

Simple – Some of the financial budgeting programs out there like Quicken are just really complicated for seemingly no reason. Granted, they do have very useful functionality, but sometimes the sheer amount of options is just overkill for beginners who are just trying to get a budget off the ground.

Fully customizable – Choose your own colors, categories, sizes, fonts, styles, and structures to fit what you need. After all, everybody is different and one standardized budgeting software isn’t going to work for all!