Google Sheets is a powerful tool for tackling various number-crunching and organisational tasks, so it makes sense to harness it if you have some figures to wrangle and you want to benefit from its cloud-powered underpinnings.
Here is a quick look at the steps to take to create a simple budget in Google Sheets without needing to become a wiz with the entire software ecosystem first.
Use a template
You can save a lot of time and hassle by taking advantage of a Google Sheets template which has been designed to let you jump into managing your budget effectively.
There are tons of templates out there, some of which focus on monthly budgets while others cater to quarterly or annual overviews. You can of course make tweaks to a template to customise it to your needs, such as including details of your PayPal business account alongside your other revenue streams, but having a cohesive foundation upon which you can build is the easiest way to go about things.
Also remember that budget templates in Google Sheets can be just as effective when used to manage household budgets as they are for business purposes.
Enter figures
With the skeleton of your budget in place, it is time to start fleshing it out with the figures from which you can extrapolate the relative success of your current budgetary strategies.
This will cover your incomings and outgoings, and you should remember to take tax into account at this point so that there are not any nasty surprises further down the line. You can also use this to determine the budgeting period to use, since you may want to make sure that this coincides with your tax filing schedule to simplify things further.
Check back regularly
So long as you have used a template and entered the right data into your fledgling budget, you should be able to use Google Sheets to see the current state of play and work out whether you are sitting pretty or in need of some improvements.
More importantly, it is essential to keep coming back to check and update your budget to ensure that it is being adhered to and also that the effects of any changes you have made are having an impact.
Key updates may include any unexpected expenditure that you were forced to make due to unforeseen circumstances, or indeed any windfalls in revenue that were not forecast.
Another benefit to keeping tabs on your budget in Google Sheets is that it will help to improve the precision of the figures and the accuracy of any predictions you make from them. In short, the more you use your budget, the bigger the benefits it will deliver.
Once you have mastered using Google Sheets to manage a simple budget, you can start to explore the myriad other features that it has to offer and ideally join the many businesses experiencing strong revenue growth at the moment.
