🛠️ Monthly budget sheet

💡 Use Case

• The sheet behind 🔹 Sunday money check: one tab per month, one row per category, planned next to actual, and a last row for what went to the fund.
• The monthly budget notes in this vault (📊 2025-01 - Budget and its eleven siblings) are the readable version. The sheet is where the sums happen.
• One extra tab tracks 🎯 Fill the sabbatical fund to 18,000 euros: date, amount, balance. Sixteen rows by the end of the year.
• In May it doubles as the tax folder's index: 📌 Collect the papers for the tax return is mostly a filter on the Freelance rows.

⚖️ Pros & Cons

Pros

• The categories are the same seventeen every month, so months can be compared without thinking.
• It takes ten minutes, and about four since the tidy-up script.
• It is boring. Money is saved in boring months and this is a boring sheet.

Cons

• Cash barely appears. The market on Saturdays is a guess.
• It shows what happened and has no opinion about it. The opinion is still my job on the first Sunday, during 🔄 Monthly paperwork.

🔄 Alternatives

• A budgeting app with bank access. I had one in 2023 and looked at it eleven times a day.
• The bank's own categories, which think the vet is Leisure.