Ready-to-go Google Sheets + Forms Setup: Track expense/income/investments, credit card usage, budget with an intuitive app-like interface
Google Sheets + Forms Setup to track expenses quickly and effectively without other 3rd party apps/dependencies. Keep track of Income/Expense of different kinds, Credit Card usage, Budget targets all in one spreadsheet. Here's how this works
Check out different tracking sheets. If you'd like to use this same sheet as a template, follow along. If you were just looking for some inspiration, feel free to integrate things you like here into your own personal finance management system.
The complete form is also shared as a PDF in the samples folder.
Make sure you're logged into your Google Drive
Create copies of the sheet and the form. Here's how:
File -> Make a copy
It's time to link your form
to the spreadsheet
.
Responses
tab, click on the green Create Spreadsheet
buttonspreadsheet
in the Drive.If you look at your spreadsheet
closely, it now has a new sheet called Form Responses
. This is the one we'll link to the back-end.
res
(I'm avoiding using responses
because it's already there)_responses
and in the first cell A1
, change the formula to =ARRAYFORMULA(res!A:I)
res
(instead of the older responses
)At this point, the dashboard and the rest of the sheets will look empty, so go ahead and fill out your form
There's a more mobile-friendly way of looking at the budget sheet. You can create beautiful dashboards with minimal effort that look like this:
Check this out if you're interested in setting it up.
Filling out the form too frequently can become cumbersome and that is one of the major drawbacks of a system like this one. A potential solution is setting up Siri to guide me through the form filling process - this is much more User Friendly than scrolling/clicking/typing inside the browser. Here's the video of this in action.
The best part - this works hands-free, so it's easy to track expenses while you're on the move. The template for this isn't quite ready yet but it's can be set up if you know your way around Forms + Siri Shortcuts. I'll share a more user-friendly template soon.
.shortcut
file and import into Siri Shortcuts.If you found this helpful, I look forward to hearing from you. Always up for a coffee.