A household budget template, and when to stop using one

01The template

One row per entry, four columns: date, title, category and amount, with money going out written as a negative number. The columns are separated by semicolons and amounts use a dot for decimals. Open it in Numbers or LibreOffice, or in Excel through Data › From Text/CSV, where you can set the separator and the decimal mark.

The twelve rows in it are an example month for one household, invented to show the shape. Delete them and put your own in.

02The four lines most budgets get wrong

• The bill that is not monthly. Insurance once a year, electricity every three months. Write the payment down once, whole, on the day it was paid, as the electricity row in the template is: splitting it into invented monthly rows leaves a file that no longer matches your bank. What gets spread is the budget. Set aside a third of a quarterly bill every month, or the month it lands will look like a disaster and the others like affluence. In Spendhog that is the Spread over (months) field on the entry: the budget counts one share a month, and the payment stays whole on its day.
• The savings line. Saving is not what is left over, it is an expense you pay yourself, which is why it is a negative row in the example and not a subtraction at the bottom.
• Cash. A withdrawal is not spending, it is a move from one pocket to another, and a budget that treats it as spending loses track of everything bought with it.
• The one-off that was not. A birthday, a vet's bill, a broken washing machine: individually exceptional, collectively a monthly line with a different name each time. Give them one category and look at the year.

03When the spreadsheet stops being enough

A spreadsheet is excellent at recording and poor at explaining. It will tell you that March cost 6,200. It will not tell you that March cost 2,000 more than your own normal month, that the difference was the car and one dinner rather than the rent, or whether that pattern is a trend or a one-off.

It also breaks quietly. A formula dragged one row short, a month added as a column that nothing sums, a second person editing a copy. Nothing warns you, and the sheet keeps answering with confidence.

And it cannot hold two currencies honestly. A household with accounts in two currencies discovers this the first time it tries: either the totals lie, or there is a rate typed into a cell somewhere, ageing.

04What we did with ours

Spendhog began as a spreadsheet called Poupanças, kept for one family for years. It keeps the parts that worked (several currencies, who spent what, bills that are not monthly) and adds the part a sheet could never do: it explains the month back to you, in words, measured against your own normal rather than against a number someone else decided.

The template above imports straight into it if you ever want to stop maintaining formulas. Thirty days free, no card, and no bank connection at any point.