Organize Your Entire Finances on One Excel Spreadsheet

I have tried many different techniques for organizing bills and have found that the simplest way is to just use an excel spreadsheet.  The only thing that is required is that you know a little bit about excel to operate it.  In this article I will show you all the basics you need to know to organize your bills in one single spreadsheet.

Keeping track of your bills does not have to be so complicated.  All you really need to do is keep track of how much you owe and to whom you owe the money to.  Take a look at the budget spreadsheet below.  This is a simple monthly bill organizer I created to help you organize your bills.  It is not very complicated and it only takes a little knowledge of excel to use it.  Here are some highlights of the sheet.

Filters – Take a look at the top line of the sheet.  You will notice the titles of each column.  There are also drop down arrows on the titles.  These are filters.  You can use these filters to display only certain items for easier reading.  For example, if you only wanted to see what credit cards you have simply click on the drop down arrow on “Category” and select “Credit Card” from the list and it will display only your credit card bills.  If you want to show everything again simply select “all” from the drop down menu.

To Set Filters – Setting up filters on columns is super easy, just highlight all the column titles you wish to create the filters for and then go to Data -> Filter -> Autofilter.  This will automatically create filters across all columns.  It’s a very simple step that can make a big difference.

Auto Color Status Column -I setup the status column to auto color the different statuses for each bill.  There are three statuses, current, late and paid off.  When a bill is current and you enter “current” in the cell it automatically colors the cell, green.

Setup Conditional Formatting – To set this up all you have to do is select the whole column, then go to Format -> Conditional Formatting -> then enter the details of how you want the cells to auto-format based on a condition.  For example, to make the cell background fill with the color green if you enter “current” as the status, you would select, “Cell value is” in the first box, “Equal to” in the second box and “current” in the third box.  Then click on the “Format” button and select the format you want for that particular data.  Then click “Add” to setup the format for the next value.

Auto Sum – The “Amount due” column is set to auto sum the values and display the totals below.  To set up an autosum all you have to do is highlight the cell you want to total to be displayed, then type the following, “=SUM(” then use the mouse to highlight all the cells to want to add up and press the enter key.  Keep in mind you can hold down control to select multiple groups of cells.

The rest of the sheet is pretty self explanatory.  I created this budget spreadsheet as an organize finances, template.  Then I realized it would be useful for anyone to use to help organize their bills.  You can download it from the link below.  The values in the sheet are obviously just examples, so delete them and add your own.

You will be amazed just how convenient it is to use a sheet like this for bills.  Make sure you email this to yourself once and awhile to back it up and so you can access it wherever you go.

Download Revenue Reservoir Bills Template

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