I wanted to have an easy way to keep a household budget.  It always seems like such a hassle and we end up giving up.  So I created a household budget using a google spreadhseet doc. The doc tracks expenses across a variety of categories (gas, electric bill, mortgage, etc). The spreadsheet is pretty advanced- I can see a month to month comparison, see where we are spending too much money. There are also graphs to track savings, etc.

The best feature of this budget spreadsheet is the ease of use.  I created a web form that populates a master log for my budget. The form is super simple. A dropdown for categories- an entry field for the amount.

It is an online form. So I have it bookmarked as does my wife. If I go out to lunch- I just visit the form and put in the amount. I hope to get an Iphone soon- so this will be even more useful. The form populates one worksheet- its just a long log of entries.   I created an array formula to take the data from this log and separate it out. The formula searches the form, for month and category- adds up all of the records found and places it in the appropriate ROW and COLUMN.

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The formula looks like this:
=IFERROR(ARRAYFORMULA(SUM( FILTER( MasterLog!$C$2:$C$99986 ; MasterLog!$B$2:$B$9986=$B17,MasterLog!$C$2:$C$99986 ; MasterLog!$E$2:$E$99986=E$15 ))), 0)

So we only have to use the web form to input expenses. The spreadhseet does the rest. We can see how we are doing month over month. We can also see how we are doing for the current month.  We can see how much we have spent on Groceries for example and how much is left to spend.

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