A budget helps you stay on track with your monthly spending by allowing you to set a target or cap on the spending for a specific category. Budgeting is a useful tool to guide your spending throughout the month and make sure you're not spending more than you're earning. By using the budgeting feature in the Foundation Template you can get a sense of how much money would be left over if you earn as much as you plan to earn and spend as much as you plan to spend. It's a really useful planning tool and can help you save money or pay down debt.

In the Foundation Template open the Categories sheet and enter the budget amounts for each category in column E. Each subsequent month will automatically be populated with the budgeted amount in column E for that category. 

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Once you’ve set the budget amounts on the Categories sheet you can start categorizing transactions and reviewing the Monthly and Yearly Budget tabs. Based on those budget view sheets you can fine tune your budget amounts for each category on the Categories sheet. 

You can change a category’s budget amount for a specific month by directly editing the value for that month. Be aware that months after that change will also inherit the new budget value. 

If you're not sure how much to budget for a specific category you can review the actuals for last month if you've got last month's data categorized. If last month was a typical month you can just use this for your monthly budget target for the category. If it was an abnormal month, just use your best guess based on that number or look at another month's data.

You can use the Monthly Budget sheet and change the months in the top right to review data from different months. Review column G the Actuals column for each category.

You can change the year’s budgeting start month by editing the date in cell E1 to be the first day of the month in which you want the budget year to start. For example, if you want your budget year to start in September 2023 you would enter 9/1/2023 into cell E1. 

The rest of the year (12 months) following Sept 2023 will automatically populate. This is nice if you just want to start budgeting from a particular month going forward. 

You can change the budget start month to get your budget ready for 2025. Learn more about how to get your budget ready for the new year and set up your categories for 2025 here.

The Monthly Budget sheet gives you a breakdown of planned vs actual spending and income as well as a planned vs actual cash flow analysis. 

Visualize your budget by type, group, and category. You can quickly see what’s remaining for a category or if you’ve gone over.

Each group’s line also indicates the % of your expense budget that’s allocated to that group.

Customize the view of the data on this sheet by using the controls in the upper right. You can view the data for the previous year and month here. If there are no budget periods configured for the time frame on the Categories sheet you will still see your actuals for that period.

You can use the Yearly Budget view to see your entire year’s budget, actuals, and available. Use this dashboard for a month over month view of your spending and budget comparison. Analyze your cash flow for the entire year based on the budget amounts you set on the Categories sheet.

You can view a different 12 month period of budgets and data using the controls in the upper right. Keep in mind this is a visualization of your data based on the start month and number of budget months that are configured on the Categories sheet. Additionally ensure that your Transactions sheet is populated in order to have the Yearly Budget sheet figures generated.

The cascading budget feature on the Categories sheet is a simple formula that pulls in the same value that is in the previous cell in the same row. By default each budget month starting in column F has this simple formula for each category row.

If you find that one of your category rows does not have the cascading feature (you inserted a row) or you need to reset it follow these steps:

If you don't see the Monthly or Yearly Budget sheets in your Foundation Template you may need to unhide them.

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