Practical guide / Household Budget Workbook 2.4
What has cleared, and what is still pending?
Your monthly spending can be under plan while a card payment is still pending. A transfer may reach Savings before leaving Current. Keep the monthly plan, each account and its statement comparison connected so you can trace the difference to the record that caused it.
Your first useful result: Match a statement without hiding pending money. Follow the first task
Plan the window before the next payday
Open Period budget. Choose From / To; save one dated plan per category below the report. Enter zero deliberately.
Actuals use existing valid Transactions up to the review date. Refunds reduce expense; transfers do not enter spending.
Review: Resolve source and plan warnings, then review where actuals differ from the chosen plan. Different windows remain separate.
Set the opening position
Choose currency, budget year and review date. Give each account a stable text ID, opening date and balance immediately before that date; card debt is negative.
Account balances add linked movements from the opening date through the review date. Cleared balances use each side’s cleared date.
Review: Start from an opening figure you can confirm in your own records.
Give each month its own plan
Define Categories, then enter twelve separate amounts per category in Budgets.
Monthly plan and Annual compare those entered plans with transactions through the review date.
Review: Changing one month’s plan does not rewrite another month.
Record a purchase, refund or transfer once
Enter a positive amount and a source Account ID. A Transfer also needs its destination ID; enter source/destination cleared dates independently.
Refund reduces the recorded expense. Transfer moves between accounts without creating income or spending. Future movements remain planned.
Review: A card purchase is an Expense; a payment between your tracked accounts is a Transfer.
Compare a statement on its own date
Enter the statement’s account, date and signed closing balance in Reconciliation. A real zero is valid; a blank amount needs correction.
The historical cleared balance minus your entered statement is rounded to cents. A one-cent difference is still a difference.
Review: Review dates, amounts and pending entries. A match is only a manual comparison; never add an invented transaction.
Keep bills and goal reserves distinct
Maintain bill status yourself. Record a goal contribution or withdrawal only when it happened.
Bill actions use due dates. Goal reserves use opening allocation plus actual changes; neither creates a transaction.
Review: Treat income less expense as a monthly flow and goal reserves as allocated money, not additional account balances.
Save the review
Resolve warnings, inspect account and category records, then save a dated copy and a backup.
Source errors suppress account totals. Statement comparisons recalculate if earlier records change.
Review: Keep your own snapshots. Carry openings manually for a new year; no automatic bank import or migration is included.
Bills can point to the actual spending.
Link an existing expense or refund to a bill once, then compare the bill amount with those linked records. Account clearing and reconciliation remain separate.
New views include inherited and new input warnings before showing dependent totals.
Review: Keep planned choices separate from actual records.
Check the assumptions.
- Manual records and statement comparisons; no bank connection, automatic import, payment, interest, tax or investment calculations.
- One currency and budget year per file. Enter each monthly plan separately; new-year opening balances are carried manually.
- 12 accounts, 144 statement comparisons and 2,000 transactions. Fixed capacities; resolve input warnings before using results.
- Monthly income less expense is a flow. Goal reserves allocate existing money and are not extra account balances.
- Bill status is manual; bills and goal contributions do not automatically create transactions.
- Statement comparisons recalculate with edited history; they are not frozen audit snapshots or bank verification.
- Keep account/category IDs stable. Mixed-category purchases need separate manual rows. There is no automatic migration from 1.1.
- Period plans use an exact From / To / category ID match. Overlapping windows are separate, not combined or prorated. 600 rows are category-plan records, not 600 complete budgets.
Keep a copy you can return to.
Keep the supplied clean and example files unchanged. Save your own working file with a useful name, such as household-budget-2027-home.xlsx, and keep a dated backup before a large edit. A purchased ZIP is the blank source, not a backup of your entries.
If an input or formula is replaced
Undo the edit while it is still available, or return to a known good backup. If you need a fresh clean file, transfer only your records into its marked input cells and follow the setup guide again. Do not paste whole sheets over the supplied formulas, validations or reference lists. Check IDs, units, dates and linked results against the example before relying on the copy.
When the supplied rows are full
2,000 transactions · 12 accounts · 144 statement comparisons · 600 dated category-plan records. Calculation ranges and validations have fixed capacities. A new row below a table does not prove that every linked result includes it.
For a separate period, project or volume, preserve the old workbook and start a named clean copy. If records must carry forward, record exactly which inputs you transfer, preserve their references and compare the opening and closing figures. Avoid copying historical activity as both an opening amount and a new movement. There is no automatic migration between files.
Inspect the workbook before you choose.
View its real sheets and a fictional calculation example.
Explore Household Budget WorkbookWritten for version 2.4. Examples describe the supplied workflow; they are not customer results.