This tutorial is about turning Google Sheets into a free budget app. Why Google Sheets? For one, it is about privacy. A typical budget app wants you to disclose your passwords to your financial accounts.

Next, Google Sheets is free and customizable. Furthermore, you will always own this budget app and can even download an Excel copy of it onto your hard drive. Finally, you can use Google Sheets as an app on your mobile phone to record expenses. Later, I will show you how.

Related Content:

I came up with a budget template in Google Sheets that I will walk you through here. You are free to download this template and do whatever you want with it.

How to Download a Free Google Sheets Template

First, open the link to the Google Sheets budget app template.

You can save it to your personal Google Drive through File>Make a Copy menu. From there, you will be able to access it from your computer. ‘You can save it to your personal Google Drive through File>Make a Copy menu. From there, you will be able to access it from your computer.

Next, go to you phone’s Google Drive. There, find the Google sheet you saved and click on the three dots.

Next, choose the Add to Home screen option. Finally, you will have access to the budget app from your phone.

Free Budget App Walkthrough

Let’s go over the app.

These five tabs are where you will record your expenses. They are broadly categorized as give, play, business, bills and taxes. The give category is where we record donations and gifts to others. Next, play is our entertainment category. Then, business is where we record expenses to develop side hustles and business ideas. Finally, bills and taxes are self-explanatory.

Recording Expenses in Budget App

When we incur expenses, we record them in these five tabs. First, you enter a brief description of an expense (e.g. Trader Joe’s grocery), the amount ($58) and choose a category from the drop-down menu (e.g. food). There are many categories to choose from. All of these categories originate from the Expense Categories tab. There, you are free to add, rename or delete any category as needed.

Monthly Allowance and Rollovers

Let’s come back to those 5 tabs again. Here, we allocate a certain monthly allowance for each category. If we do not spend it, we roll it over. And, you can use the expense allocation tab to come up with your own allocations.

Tracking Expenses on Smartphones

We often use our phones to record expenses on the go. It is so convenient. Just open the app, go to the desired tab, enter an expense and voila. Moreover, if you share this Google Sheet with other family members, they could record expenses too. That’s the beauty of this free budget app.

Monthly Expenses, Income and Savings Analysis

At the end of each month, we analyze our expenses and income using the Budget tab.

Here, we input our income first. Feel free to add anything you’d like here. As for the expenses, they are automatically summarized here by each tab and category. Also, you can create a separate tab to compare budget and actual figures by expense type, if you wish.

Additionally, you will be able to see your monthly savings and savings rate here. Savings are income minus expenses. The monthly savings rate is equal to savings divided by the income.

Net Worth Review

After the budget tab, we move on to the net worth tab. Here, we enter assets and liabilities to calculate our net worth. If you do not what your net worth it, read my article on how to calculate your net worth.

Once you are done with a certain month, you can hide it in each tab and unhide the next month.

I created this template with years into the future. Furthermore, if you run out of entry points, you can copy and paste them.

This is true for all tabs. And, everything is populated automatically based on formulas.

Concluding Remarks

We are not budget freaks. Instead, we want to know where our money goes. We also want to know our average annual expenses. Knowing living expenses can help you estimate the savings needed for retirement. If you have questions, let me know in the comments below or contact me.