by Matthew Adams

Created on: December 10, 2010

A personal finance worksheet can be great to have. Overall, there are a number of potential software packages for personal finance, but spreadsheet software such as OpenOffice Calc or Microsoft Excel is recommended for budgeting spreadsheets. With these, you can establish a variety of personal budgeting worksheets.

To get started with first need to select a suitable software package for the personal finance worksheet. As mentioned, Calc or Excel are two that are recommended. Overall, as Calc is a free software title as part of the freeware OpenOffice office suite it is most suitable. Generally, Calc and Excel have similar options and features.

When you have a suitable software package, you can begin the personal finance worksheet. Overall, a personal finance worksheet will provide a worksheet to keep a record of monthly and annual expenses. This would be a basic budgeting spreadsheet.

So, in this respect a basic budgeting spreadsheet will require a row of months to be entered into twelve cells across the worksheet. Put these months in correct order from Jan through to December, plus you may want to title the spreadsheet with the relevant year.

When you have done this, you should then add an expense column on the left side of the Jan column. For these column, you should include at least 10 empty cells before the final monthly expense heading which is included at the bottom of this column.

When you have done this, you can begin formatting the spreadsheet. Format the spreadsheet with bold lines at the bottom of the monthly column cell titles such as Jan, Feb etc, and on the right side of the expense column. Then, another bold line should be included at the top of the monthly expense totals. To do this, simply select the relevant cells, right-click and then the borders tab. Then, you select the relevant border options.

In addition to this, you can also use bold text for column headings. Select the text and then the bold option from the spreadsheet toolbar.

Finally, you will need to add the sums. To do this, select the first cell to the right of the total monthly expense heading, then the E symbol on the left side of the function bar in Calc. From here, you select all the cells above that will include monthly expenses and press enter. To copy the sum into all the adjacent cells in the monthly expense row you can simply drag the first cell to the others.

With this, your personal finance worksheet should be something like this:

Monthly expense,       Jan, Feb, Mar, April, May, June

?
?

Total monthly expense, 56, 55,    67 , 112

This worksheet may also need some testing. Make use of dummy data to check the sums are totalling okay. In addition to this, consider making use of the currency format for numerical cells.

With this, you have a basic personal finance budgeting worksheet that will provide monthly totals for expenses. From here, you can expand on the spreadsheet to include graphs, and perhaps also some additional sums if required.

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