Daily Book-Keeping Spreadsheet v0907

Introduction
I started to have the habit of recording my daily expenses on a spreadsheet since university, which is like 7 years ago.

Initially the purpose of doing so was to give my parents a figure of living cost as they were my financial supplier. Slowly, it has became my habit, and it comes very handy when you want to know exactly where you spent the money to or when you want to have some budgeting over a period of time.

Through out the past 7 years I have been modifying the spreadsheet to make it easier to use while able to capture data in more detail. Now, I think it is mature enough to be the first version to share with people, so everyone can start building this good habit of bookkeeping. If you use this spreadsheet correctly, it can be as accurate as your bank account statement, and it might come handy when doing tax return.

Download Daily Book-Keeping Spreadsheet v0907
Excel 2003 or earlier version...download here
Excel 2007 or later version... download here (recommended!!)

Quick start guide
Let me have a quick go through of how to start using this spreadsheet, from now on I will refer daily book-keeping spreadsheet as "DBS".

First, you need to give the spreadsheet some initial data to start with. This only needs to be done once every year.
In the "Start" worksheet as shown below, you can fill in some details of your current financial status so that DBS can use these values as a base for calculations.

• Financial Year/Month: Year and month that the financial year starts, eg 2009 July
• Bank name / balance: For up to 2 bank accounts, enter the balance as at the day you start book keeping. Bank 1 should be your primary transaction account. You can also give them names e.g. savings
  
• Share Trading balance: (optional) enter the amount that you have invested on share
  
• Managed Fund balance: (optional) enter the amount that you have invested on managed funds.
  
• Outstanding card bill: The credit card bill outstanding since your last paid bill.
  
• Monthly card bill end day: Day of month which the credit card bill cycle ends.

In the summary page you will find a few tables that list out your monthly expense and position.
The total wealth section shows your net wealth position each month (taken out bills payable and includes all investments).
The credit amount (red) in bank summary section keeps track of your credit card expense according to your billing cycle, the calculation depends on the billing cycle end date you entered in start page.
The expense summary section breaks down your expense into 8 categories of your choice (you can rename these categories, but you don't have to use all 8), and gives you weekly/monthly average. Some example category can be food, travel, bills and rent.

Now lets look at the work sheet for month. This is where you keep all your expense details, as you can see from the screen shot below. The expenses are split into 3 major groups : cash (green), credit (blue) and EFPOS (gray), each group is divided further into categories as defined in summary sheet. The expenses recorded under credit group will affect the credit amount displayed in summary page, where the EFPOS expense will directly deduct the amount from your bank 1 account.
Red colored section are non expense transactions, it will affect the bank 1 amount but should not be considered as expense, for example credit card bill payment and withdraw.
If you do the transfer between accounts (bank 1 to bank 2, bank 1 to share account etc), you can use the purple column to record. Currently it only support transfers from primary bank account, you record positive amount when deposit into bank 1, negative when transfer out of bank 1.

hint: You can hide the category columns that you don't use so the page will look neater.

I hope the above intro can get you started with DBS, the fastest way to get familiar is to give it a quick play. Just keep in mind that don't overwrite the cells that are filled with formula, if you find certain amount does not match with real data, most of the time you should be able to trace back your records and find out the source of mismatch.

Finally feedback and recommendation are welcome, and please do let me know if you found any bug or have any question =) Thanks!