Expense Tracking with Spreadsheets: What Works and What Doesn't

Last year I tracked every dollar I spent for six months in Google Sheets. By month three, I had a gorgeous color-coded dashboard with pivot tables and conditional formatting. By month five, I’d stopped entering receipts entirely. The spreadsheet was too much work.

That cycle — ambitious setup, gradual abandonment — is the most common outcome for spreadsheet-based expense tracking. But it doesn’t have to be. Spreadsheets can work if you build them right, which means building them simple.

Start With Five Columns, Not Fifteen

Most spreadsheet templates you find online are overengineered. They have columns for payment method, vendor name, subcategory, tax status, and a notes field nobody uses. All that friction adds up to about 90 seconds per entry instead of 15. Over a month with 80-100 transactions, that’s the difference between a two-hour chore and a ten-minute habit.

Here’s what you actually need:

• Date — when you spent the money
• Amount — how much
• Category — one of 8-12 buckets (more on this below)
• Description — a few words so you remember what it was
• Recurring? — yes or no, so you can separate fixed costs from discretionary spending

That’s it. You can add columns later if you need them. You probably won’t.

Pick Categories That Match Your Life

The standard budget categories you see everywhere — housing, transportation, food, utilities, insurance — were designed for financial planners, not for someone trying to figure out why they’re broke by the 25th of every month.

Build categories around the decisions you actually make. If you never eat out, you don’t need “Dining” and “Groceries” as separate categories. If you spend $200 a month on hobby supplies, that deserves its own line instead of being buried under “Entertainment.”

A solid starting set for most people in their 20s:

• Rent / Housing
• Groceries
• Eating Out & Drinks
• Transport
• Subscriptions
• Shopping (clothes, electronics, random stuff)
• Health
• Fun / Social

Eight categories. Easy to remember, easy to assign. You can run =SUMIF(B:B, "Groceries", C:C) against each one and get your monthly breakdown in under a minute.

The Formulas That Actually Matter

You don’t need to be a spreadsheet wizard. Four formulas cover 90% of what’s useful.

Total spending for the month:

=SUM(C2:C500)

Spending per category:

=SUMIF(B2:B500, "Eating Out & Drinks", C2:C500)

Category as a percentage of total:

=SUMIF(B2:B500, "Shopping", C2:C500) / SUM(C2:C500)

Daily average spend:

=SUM(C2:C500) / DAY(TODAY())

That last one is underrated. If your daily average is $67 and you’re on day 18, you’ve spent about $1,206 — and you can project that you’ll hit roughly $2,010 by month’s end. It takes five seconds to check and tells you whether to ease up or keep going.

One Sheet Per Month Is a Trap

A common setup is creating a new tab for each month: “January,” “February,” etc. It feels organized. In practice, it makes analysis painful. Comparing categories across months means writing cross-sheet references like =January!C15 + February!C15 + March!C15, and if your row numbers shift, everything breaks.

Better approach: put all your data in one sheet. Add a “Month” column (or just use the date column) and filter or pivot from there. One flat table of data is easier to sort, chart, and query than twelve separate tabs.

If you’re using Google Sheets, the QUERY function is worth learning for this:

=QUERY(A:E, "SELECT B, SUM(C) WHERE D = 'March' GROUP BY B ORDER BY SUM(C) DESC")

That gives you a ranked list of your March spending by category. One formula, no manual work.

Where Spreadsheets Start to Crack

Spreadsheets are good at storing and calculating data. They’re bad at getting data into them in the first place. That’s the fundamental tension.

The entry problem. You buy a coffee. You need to open your phone, load the spreadsheet app (which is slow on mobile), find the right cell, type the date, the amount, pick a category, add a description, and save. That’s six steps for a $4.50 latte. Most people do this diligently for two weeks and then quietly stop.

The receipt problem. A grocery receipt with 15 items contains useful data — you could see that you spend $40 a week on snacks versus $25 on vegetables. But nobody is typing 15 line items into a spreadsheet after every grocery run. So you enter the total, and the granular insight disappears.

The consistency problem. Miss a few days of entries and your data has gaps. Gaps make trends unreliable. Unreliable trends make the whole project feel pointless. It’s a vicious cycle.

The collaboration problem. If you share expenses with a partner or roommates, real-time editing in Google Sheets works in theory. In practice, one person does all the entry and the other person checks the totals once a month. The system depends on both people maintaining the same discipline.

None of these problems mean spreadsheets are useless. They mean spreadsheets work best when you keep them simple enough that the friction stays low. The moment your tracker feels like a second job, it’s already dying.

Tips for Making It Stick

If you’re going to use a spreadsheet, here’s what helps:

Enter expenses the same day. Set a daily reminder for 9 PM. Spend two minutes entering the day’s purchases. Batch processing “once a week” turns into “once in a while” turns into never.

Round your numbers. $4.50 becomes $5. $23.47 becomes $23. You’re tracking patterns, not reconciling a bank statement. Precision costs time and doesn’t change the takeaway.

Review weekly, not monthly. A monthly review means you find out you overspent on dining after the damage is done. A weekly scan — even a 60-second glance at your daily average — lets you course-correct in real time.

Don’t chart everything. A single bar chart showing category totals is more useful than a dashboard with six charts. Most of those charts tell you the same thing in different shapes.

When a Spreadsheet Isn’t Enough

At some point you might find yourself spending more time maintaining the spreadsheet than learning from it. That’s the signal to try a dedicated tool.

Receiptix handles the parts that make spreadsheets tedious. Its AI receipt scanning lets you photograph a grocery receipt and get every item pulled out automatically — the kind of line-item detail that nobody bothers typing into cells manually. Spending charts update on their own, so you skip the formula-writing and go straight to seeing where your money goes. And if you track expenses in more than one currency (common if you travel or shop internationally), Receiptix handles conversion without a lookup table.

The data stays useful even if you’re not hands-on. Smart categorization sorts your entries based on what you’ve spent before, which means you get consistent categories without maintaining a dropdown list.

Spreadsheets taught a lot of people (myself included) the basics of knowing where money goes. That foundation matters. But the tool should serve the habit, not the other way around. If the spreadsheet is working, keep using it. If it’s not, Receiptix is a good place to start fresh.