The Budget Planner Excel Spreadsheet is a powerful accounting and budgeting spreadsheet that works equally well with Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice.org‘s Calc. You can use it to draw up a budget, keep track of your income, expenses and transfers between accounts, and see how your actual income and expenses compare to the amounts you budgeted. [...]

If you’ve never done this before, a great way to stun yourself is to go obsessive and write down every cent you spend, for a whole month. Once you get behind 4 or 5 days, it becomes difficult to remember what you paid for lunch two days ago, the credit-card slips start peeling out of all your pockets, and eventually the whole business just becomes too much effort to catch up on.

You’ll find three tab-sheets in the Expense Tracker Spreadsheet: Setup Expenses Summary To use the Expense Tracker Spreadsheet: On the Setup tab-sheetDefine your expense categories and payment accounts (e.g.

I haven’t said anything about keeping a budget until now, because for many people a traditional budget simply doesn’t work. Keeping a budget doesn’t mean you have to use a budgeting program, or record every expense on an excel spreadsheet, or in a book.