This help page is intended to assist you with specific, step-by-step “how to” suggestions related to this budget program—the nitty gritty of how to do things.  The twin end balances (cash flow and category transactions) in columns D and J at the bottom of each monthpage will keep you on track, and if you save your budget after each session only after you get  those twin balances in agreement to the penny through December, your financial budget totals should be accurate.

Let’s try a quick copy through all twelve months:

Using a right hand finger on the pagedown button and your “left pinky” and index finger to press ctrl+V after every third pagedown click, copy the correct year to all twelve months.  Use this same page-up or page-down  method to copy any amount of cells throughout the year, especially when you’re setting up a new budget year.

This is the only time you’ll need to enter a value in this position, since all other months except January have a formula in the beginning balance value, brought forward from the previous month’s end balance.   Similarly, you will not enter an end balance in any month.  That will automatically adjust its amount to the income and expenses you enter throuh January.

1. Beginning in cell M8, briefly identify your first regular (monthly) expense.  On the sample budget I use mortgage/rent, and enter your amount in O8.
2. Repeat the category names and amounts you normally write checks for each month, whether by paper or online e-payments against your checking account.  Don’t forget to “pay yourself” a realistic cash total as a regular expense, and a payment to your credit card companies. 
3. Next, you may wish to enter the date of the month you’d normally prefer to write these checks or withdraw these amounts.  If  the transactions are split into more than one day per month, enter “var” instead of the date (“various”).  I prefer to pay mine around the 15^th and 30^th.
4. Using your cursor to select the entire range of dates, categories, names and amounts you established as these regular expenses for January (L7 through O24), copy them to the clipboard (ctrl+C), then pagedown three clicks per month and paste them (ctrl-V) into the other eleven months in the same positions.
5. Note that your end-of-month balance continues to tank as you go.  If you have no income, you’ll be in dire straits before long, because your regular monthly expenses are vacuuming your checking account unabated!

Help to pay your expenses is on the way!  Enter your main job paychecks, social security income, etc. for January in category 501 (H7-H9) and your spouse’s in category 502 (H11-13).—whatever net amount after deductions  you’re actually depositing into checking—and the dates you normally expect to get paid.   

You’re Almost Done!

Now copy all your January cash flow amounts through the other months of the year.  The year-end December cells D754 and J754 should still match.

You won’t know when you set up your budget what these may be.  If you do want to “reserve” an amount for a future date, you can.  But don’t forget to enter it immediately in the cash flow side for that date as well.  Note that in the sample budget  I reserve not only cash each month but also a sizable amount to pay the chargecard issuer for whatever I might charge through the previous 30 days or so.  If it turns out I don’t owe that much when the bill comes, I change it for that month in the category item and the cash flow side.  Doing this, I eventually paid off my charge cards entirely and continue to do so each month.  So can you!  Since major vendors usually factor in your charge payments in determining your credit rating, this is a good thing to try to do.  You’ve already given yourself a head start just by reminding yourself on the right page when you charged each purchase, what category you’ll cost it to, and the amount.  And again, if you’re charging things more than the 27 or so “active” rows allocated in the monthpage, (because they show as category totals in the Charges summary area) you may need to either group some of them or consider a different spreadsheet design.

Note that the charges are the only transactions you enter that you won’t duplicate on the cash flow side, because you pay for them as a single check from your account to your card issuer each month.  That is not the case for transactions you categorize and enter in “Other Expenses,” which must be entered in cash flow as well.

I go ahead and list it in Other Expenses as a category 121 Medicine transaction so it will accumulate to monthly and yearly totals I can possibly deduct on my taxes.  Then I also enter it in cash flow for the date I paid for it.  But here’s the difference:  In the D (running balance) column formula I delete the right five characters.  Thus, the checking account balance remains unchanged from the row above it.  But since I have still treated it as a checking account loss in Other Expenses, I need to also go up and deduct it from category 111, cash total for the month.  That way the cash flow balance again matches the category side balance for the month, I show I bought the medicine, and everyone is happy.

We began January with a $10,000 beginning balance (J3) and ended with an end balance of  $11227.02 (O3, J61, and D61), gaining 1,227.02 for the month. (O61).  If the other months’ income and expenses of the sample budget sheet (which I have only provided values for through March), I would show a gain of $4,968.98 (O58) which is repeated in that same relative position on every monthpage February-December.

Your Pageamonth spreadsheet comes pre-formatted to print 12 monthly pages plus an annual summary page, all on standard 8/12x11" notebook-size pages. 

If you want to see how Excel pagebreaks these, hit Print Preview, then View/Pagebreak.  If alignment needs adjusting to match the margins you want to print, you can move the dotted lines in the January area to the size you wish., and the other pages will scale to the same size. 

Working from the notebook printout pages vs. working from the computer screens:

I find it convenient working offline to make a full year's hard copy of all the months plus summary page.  I create each new year's budget on a new file named "Budget08" or "Budget09" etc.during the previous year's December, so it's ready to go as the new year begins and I continue my budget seamlessly into January.    I punch holes and put the new pages in my ring-binder behind my previous year summary page.  Then, as I modify each month's values for actual experience through that month, I print out just that monthpage and replace the obsolete values one in my notebook.  By the end of the year I have my twelve pages of actual experience values, and I add my summary page, then I have a good, detailed, offline package of information to work with when I prepare my taxes. 

I use separate tax preparation software, so when I want to see what I spent the previous year, for example, for professional unreimbursed expenses, I go to the yearend summary for those category totals for both 122 (cash) and 132 (charged) transactions, add them and I have it.  I usually refer to each month page as well to see if I missed any items that may have been assigned to other categories by error, and correct them, and lastly I go back through my handwritten check register to make sure I caught every deductible item and costed them accurately to the right category on my monthpages.

Daily transactions are done on the computer screen, and I rarely bother to print a monthly page until the end of the month after I enter my final costs and income numbers.  The computer lets me page down and see what each transaction does to my bottom line for the month and the year easily on one electronic page,   But I usually work with hard copy after each month passes.  An exception would be if any numbers change for previous months, in which case I'd enter correct them and print out a new one.