How to Create a Budget in Google Sheets [Guide 2023]

If you want to track your money and like to learn more about it, you should build your budget. Various tools can make you a budget but first, you must try to simply create your budget with Google Sheets. It is a great tool for budgeting either for a large company or a small family because it will help you to determine your future goals and get through your tough times. With Google Sheets, you would be able to create your budget in less than an hour.

This article is specifically proposed to help you learn how to create a budget in Google Sheets. Google Sheets provides you with a platform where you can easily customize your budget. It is fairly simple to create a budget in Google Sheets. If you are searching for quick and easy ways of budgeting to keep your spending under control, you are at the right place. We will walk you through the step-by-step procedure of creating a budget in Google Sheets. I recommend you read this article till the end, so you can learn how to create a budget in Google Sheets.

Importance of Creating a Budget in Google Sheets

We should learn how to create a budget in Google Sheets because it greatly helps us to keep an eye on our long-term goals to work toward them, keep track of our earnings and expenses, and save and spend money precisely. Budgeting restrains you from tossing your money at every shiny and pretty object. In this way, you can manage your money in a better way.

Following a budget plan will save you in your worst time. As our lives are full of unexpected events. You may face some emergencies such as becoming sick, having an accident or having financial crises. In this position, you are ready to face and overcome these emergencies through the money saved while budgeting.

In a nutshell, a budget helps create strong financial stability. It becomes easier to pay bills on time and save money for major expenses or emergencies. So, let’s learn how to create a budget in Google Sheets. We have a step-by-step procedure in the next section which will help you to create a budget in Google Sheets. Have a look at these steps to achieve your milestones.

How to Create a Budget in Google Sheets

Creating a budget in Google Sheets is such a childish task there is no need for any technical or professional skills to create a budget in Google Sheets. Although Google Sheets have a template for making a budget in the Google Sheets template gallery you can create a budget in Google Sheets with just a few clicks. But in this tutorial, we will not use a template to create a budget in Google Sheets. We will simply create our simple pattern of the budget which we need.

Create a Budget in Google Sheets – using Basic Formulas

In this procedure, first, we will discuss our earnings and calculate the total income by simple basic formulas and then we will discuss the expenses that we commonly face in a month. Then in the end we will make a table to calculate the difference between earnings and expenses so that we may know whether the budget is surplus or deficit. In this way, we can make our savings as well. Let’s start with the help of examples without wasting the time.

Step 1

As we decide we will not use the Google Sheets template so here we are taking a new blank file in Google Sheets.

Step 2

First, we will describe what period we are going to create a budget. Here I am creating a budget for January. In this table, we will take three columns in which we will mention our actual budget and expenses and the difference.

Step 3

Now first let’s see what our total earnings are, so here we are going to make a table where we will describe all income sources.

Step 4

In this table write your all income sources and then add them to calculate our total earnings so that we may estimate our budget.

Step 5

After creating the portion of income now we will go for the portion of expenses in which we will describe all the expenses that are made in the whole month.

Step 6

In this section, write all your regular and essential expenses which are mostly indeed.

Note: This item list is changeable in which you can add or remove more items according to your need.

Step 7

To make your budget a little more attractive, let’s do some formatting of our headings by fill color.

Step 8

Let’s start writing our income figures from all sources.

Step 9

Once you have written your all income figures then calculate them to find your total income for a budget.

Note: Before writing the amount, change the text format to the currency as we are writing the amount in dollars.

Step 10

To calculate the total income of the budget we are using the “SUM” function to add all sources of income.

Step 11

After writing the sum function, open the small bracket and give the range above all incomes and simply press the “Enter” button to get the results.

Step 12

This is the result of our total earnings for the month. Now, by this amount, we will estimate the monthly budget.

Step 13

As we wrote all sources of income, similarly here we will write all expenses amounts to calculate all expenditures as shown in the figure.

Step 14

To calculate all expenditures again we will use the sum function of Google Sheets.

Step 15

There is no other argument used in the sum function, just give the cell range after writing the sum function and hit the Enter button to get the results.

Step 16

We are almost done with our total income and total expenditure. Let’s write them in the first table to calculate the difference whether we are in loss or profit. In the first table, there were three columns first for the budget where we will write our total earnings or income, and the second our actual expenses.

Step 17

Now, In the difference column to find the difference simply subtract the total earnings from total expenses as you can see in the following picture.

Step 18

As we pressed the Enter button we got the result which is “$60” which means we have saved $60 in our budget.

In this simple way, you can create your whole budget and calculate all the amounts with very simple and basic functions.

Create a Budget in Google Sheets – Using Conditional Formatting

Google Sheets are full of thousands of different features in it, by which you can format your budget and can make your budget more helpful and attractive. You can add more functionality to your budget with some kinds of formatting. Which one of them we are going to discuss below,

Step 1

First, go into the “Format” tab in the menu bar of Google Sheets and then go into the “Conditional Formatting” option from the dialogue box.

Step 2

A pane menu for conditional formatting will open at the right side of the window where we are going to apply the first rule in the cell of difference we found as you can see in the following example. In this rule first select the condition for the cell that If the cell is less than “0”, So fill it with red color.

Step 3

And then press the Done button to save the rule. In the same cell, we will apply another rule by the following option.

Step 4

In this rule, we will apply the condition for a cell that if the cell is greater than “0” then fill the cell with green color and then click on the “Done” button to save the formatting, and then close the pane menu by clicking on cross button at the right top corner of the pane menu.

Step 5

The benefit of this formatting will be indicated by changing the cell color if you are going in profit the cell color will remain green, but if you are going in negative or loss then the cell color will be red to alert you. As you can see the results below expenditure rises with the budget and the difference turns into minus so it is indicated by the red color.

Step 6

Similarly, in the following example, the budget is going in profit and we have saved money in the wallet or difference so it is being indicated by green color.

Step 7

This is our complete monthly budget with total income and total expenditure and the difference as well. Similarly, you can create a budget for other months as well and then conclude them all months with an annual budget as well.

Frequently Asked Questions

How to get a free budget template for Google Sheets?

You can get so many free online available templates of Google Sheets openly and freely available for every internet user. Although I would recommend you to use your custom template like the above, or if you have a big data set to make a budget then you can the Google Sheets provided budget template in Template Gallery.

Conclusion

Today, we learned how to create a budget in Google Sheets. Office demy aims to deliver every solution in simple ways to make users easily understand. Therefore, we didn’t use the Google Sheets template for creating a budget because the default template for the budget in Google Sheets is very complex and consists of very unnecessary functions. Hope the above simple method of how to create a budget in Google Sheets will be more accessible in your opinion. We have tried all the essential things to create a budget, you can also add some charts and graphs to this budget to monitor and visualize data. If there is a deficiency or query must remind us in the comment section.