Managing your budget is an important part of keeping your finances in check. If you’re looking for an easy way to keep track of your funds, here’s a list of free budget templates for Microsoft Excel that you can use for personal, household, business, and event budget management.
Tip: while you get your finances in order, also consider your other assets. These Excel inventory templates can help you keep track of your stuff.
1. Income and Expense Tracking Worksheet
This Income and Expense Tracking Worksheet is a simple Excel budgeting template that allows you to easily monitor the money going in and out of your pocket. You can add a starting balance for each account type at the beginning of every month or track more than one month’s worth of expenses.
Using this Excel budget template, you can get a bird’s-eye view of your cash, checking account, and credit card balances after every recorded transaction. You can break down every transaction by account, spending category, and amount. You’re not limited to these account or category types either, as you can add your own via the worksheet’s Settings sheet.
Tip: do you want to navigate Microsoft Excel more efficiently? Here’s a list of Excel keyboard shortcuts you can use!
2. Monthly Household Budget Worksheet
If you’re in charge of finances in your household, it’s important to have a tool for keeping track of how much gets spent on groceries, rent, car/home maintenance, and additional expenses every month.
With this Monthly Household Budget Worksheet, you can add specific household expenses as well as the overall household income. You can use the predefined categories or edit the worksheet according to your individual needs. Breaking each spending sub-category into “Budget” and “Actual” expenses allows you to easily tell whether you managed to save anything at the end of the month.
3. Basic Personal Budget Template
Microsoft’s own Basic Personal Budget template offers a simple way to track your expenses on a yearly basis. It consists of two sheets: one for setting up your budget and viewing current income status and one for adding expenses.
This template includes a “Cash short/extra” section that displays whether you’ve managed to save up cash each month based on the expenses you add.
4. Business Budget Template
The Business Budget Template is a free Microsoft template that targets business owners. It features separate sheets where you can add different business income streams, personnel expenses, and operating expenses, as well as a sheet that shows a summary of the three already mentioned.
Of course, the template is editable, so you don’t need to stick to presets. For instance, you can rename its sheets to reflect your own business model. The tool boasts both detailed and general views of your business’s income and expenses, which helps with business budget allocation.
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5. My College Budget Template
If you’re a student, the My College Budget option may be exactly what you need. It’s a monthly template with dedicated sheets for tracking and budgeting your income as well as monthly and semester expenses. The template makes use of colorful visuals to let you view how much of your monthly budget has been spent at a given time to easily see how much you have left to spend for the rest of the month.
You can add your loans, financial aid, and other income sources that you might have available to the worksheet. As for the expenses sheets, they are designed to let you keep track of expenses, such as food, utilities, tuition payments, books and more.
6. Vacation Budget Planner
Are you going on a trip soon? Budgeting your projected expenses is something that should be on your pre-trip list. It’s also something you can do while you’re away so that you don’t go overboard with expenses and save up some cash for souvenirs as well.
The Vacation Budget Planner boasts predefined fields for trip expenses per category, like transportation, food, activities, etc. It also includes sections for pre-trip expenses, such as airfare, hotels, and others. If you’re traveling on a budget, this template will help you keep your spending in check.
7. Savings Estimator
The Savings Estimator template will help you set a savings goal with a start and end date for a specific purpose. It can be an upcoming trip, a big purchase, a life event, or other things you want to save money for.
The workbook lets you set how much to save daily, bi-weekly, and monthly to reach your savings target on the date you set. Once you add this data, you’ll be able to see how long it will take to reach your goal.
Good to know: do you want to keep your budget templates private? Learn how to password-protect an Excel workbook.
8. Weekly Budget Worksheet
If you want to track your weekly and bi-weekly expenses rather than your monthly or annual expenses, this Weekly Budget Worksheet is a good pick. Its dedicated sheets feature specific expense categories, such as “Transportation” or “Health,” which can, of course, be edited according to your needs.
You can add a budget for each spending sub-category as well as actual expenses. A third column will reveal whether you’ve managed to save or went over budget. As you add the data, the tool will also generate “Projected End Balance” info.
9. Party Budget Worksheet
Are you planning a party or hosting other special events in the future and want to stick to a budget? Then this Party Budget Worksheet could be an essential tool for throwing a great get-together. It has fields where you can set your overall budget and add the amounts you’ve spent for services, such as catering, tables and chairs, audio equipment, etc.
After you’ve added all the data, the worksheet will show you how much of your budget was spent. You also get a graph that offers a visual overview of what you spent the most money on.
Tip: get better at using Excel by unlocking the power of Power Pivot and other advanced features.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a Microsoft 365 subscription to use these templates?
No. You can use all templates we recommended in the free Web version of Microsoft Excel. However, you’ll need to create a Microsoft account to access it.
Do these budget templates work with Google Sheets and other Microsoft Excel alternatives?
The first two templates on this list work with Google Sheets, as the creators made specific versions that are optimized for Google Sheets. But if you want to use the templates created by Microsoft in apps like Google Sheets and others, there might be some formatting issues. If you prefer the Google alternative to Excel, here are some of the most useful formulas you can use with Google Sheets.
Will these templates work on the mobile version of Microsoft Excel?
Yes. If you have the Microsoft Office app for iOS, iPadOS, or Android, these Excel-optimized budget templates will work perfectly. However, you may have issues viewing and editing the template if your phone’s screen is small. It’s best to use bigger phones and tablets for convenience.
Image credit: Pixabay. All screenshots by Natalie dela Vega
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