$14.99
Budget versus actual with a correct variance convention, fixed and discretionary cost structure, four income shock scenarios and a runway figure in months.
Instant digital delivery. One purchase, one file, no subscription. Full refund within 14 days if it does not do what this page says it does.
A budget template tells you what you spent. This one tells you what it means: whether you can absorb a shock, which categories are quietly drifting, and how long your money lasts if your income stops.
Seven tabs in Google Sheets. You enter transactions. Everything else is derived.
Spend less than you budgeted on an expense and that is favourable, so it shows as a positive number. Earn more than you budgeted, also favourable, also positive.
Most templates simply subtract, which means earning more than planned appears as a negative. It is the single most common error in budget spreadsheets, and you can check this one against your own numbers in about thirty seconds.
Every category is classified as Fixed, Variable, Discretionary or Savings. Fixed costs are committed: rent, insurance, loan payments, none of which you can cut this month. Discretionary spending can stop tomorrow. Variable sits between.
The higher your fixed share, the less able you are to respond to a shock. That is the same operating-leverage logic used to analyse a company, applied to a household. The workbook calculates:
Four scenarios, calculated from your own numbers: income down 20 percent, 30 percent, 50 percent, and gone entirely. Each shows the monthly gap, how long your liquid assets cover it, and how much longer if you cut discretionary spending.
Where income still covers that spending level, the scenario reads covered, because nothing is being drawn down at all. This is arithmetic, not a forecast. The point is to know the number before you need it.
If you are paid every two weeks you receive 26 paycheques a year, not 24. Two months carry a third one. A budget built on two paycheques a month loses those, and they are the months where saving is actually possible.
All actuals are averaged over the months present in your data, so they compare like for like against a monthly budget. Comparing a three-month total to a monthly budget is a common and expensive error.
One purchase, one spreadsheet in your own Drive. No subscription, no account to keep, no monthly fee.
Copy the file, reload it once, run a single menu command. Nothing to configure and no setup wizard.
Every figure that changes your plan shows how it got there, in the sheet, before anything is rewritten.
The script reads and edits that one spreadsheet. No email, no other Drive files, and nothing is collected by us.
Google Sheets only. Excel cannot run the automation. Menu commands need a desktop browser, and day to day use works on mobile.
Immediately, as a link to the workbook and a setup manual. You copy the file into your own Google Drive and it is yours from that point.
No. The automation is Google Apps Script, which only runs inside Google Sheets. Opening the file in Excel gives you a spreadsheet with no menu and formulas that will not resolve.
Reload the file first, because the menu only appears after the first reload. If that does not fix it, support goes to a person and you get a reply rather than a ticket number.
Within 14 days, if the workbook will not build or does not do what this page says it does. The one exclusion is buying it for Excel, which is stated here, in the terms, and on How it works.
