Doing your home budget accounting is a really good idea. It allows to track the flow of your funds and do some budget planning. There are tons of mobile applications on app stores. Part of them are paid applications; others are free but full of advertisements. The most uncomfortable in these apps is that you have to work with presets and do not have many possibilities to customize.
We want to present you a very quick way to create your budget tracker within several minutes. Moreover, the main advantage – it is absolutely customizable and you can add there anything you want.
So let’s start. First of all, you will need to access your Google Drive. If you have you Gmail account already, you can access it from your mail box. If not, it is worth to create one.
When you accessed you Google drive, you may want to create a separate folder to store your tracker files. In this folder right click on the main area (as on the screenshot) and select to create a new file and then Google Forms.
Click on UNTITLED FORM in the upper left corner and name your form. This will also save the document.
After the form is saved, we can start creating a form itself. Let’s define what information do you want to collect and how. We would recommend to build your form using following fields, but you can always add more as it is fully customizable.
1. Date
Date can be populated automatically or if you want to enter date manually (to be able to record future and past dates), you will need to add a field as “date” question type ( and time if needed).
2. Amount
This is a field that you add to enter the transactions/amount of money spent. Just use “text” as question type and make sure that data validation is on. Set data validation to number, so it will not allow enter nothing but the number is that field. It will be set to “Greater than”: if you want to be able to enter negative values set it to -999999; if no – keep it blank.
3. Expense type
Create several expense types like transportation, groceries, leisure, etc. Make sure create “other” category in case expenses will not fit into any category you have. These categories you add as “choose from a list” question type and then create the list itself.
4. Notes
Create notes field to be able to add more info on expenses if needed. Use “paragraph” questions type for this.
5. Who?
You might need this question in case there are multiple family members using this form. This allows to separate everybody’s expenses if needed. Use “choose from the list” question type.
For majority of the questions you would want to have them as required fields to avoid empty data.
You can go to “change theme” to make your form look better.
Hit “send form” in right upper corner to share this form with other family members. It will send a link, and you just save it on you phone as the favourite to able to open it any time. After the form is shared, you will get an option to create an answers file. Just hit CREATE and the file with the expenses will be created on Google Drive.
That works really good on the mobile devices and is comfortable to use.
If you want to check the expenses and get some totals and stats, just go to you google drive and you will see an Excel file near your form.
Open it up and you will get all the information you need.
Enjoy
