Family budget template: the columns you actually need
Most family budget templates look great and get filled in for exactly two weeks. The problem is not the formulas but how much one entry costs.
In short
A family budget template needs only seven columns: date, who spent it, account, category, amount, whether the expense is essential, and a note. Three sheets — income, expenses and a monthly summary — and ten to twelve categories. The only formulas you need are the total per category, the share of income and what is left per day. Everything else makes the sheet prettier and more expensive to fill in, and it gets abandoned.
Downloading a family budget template is easy. Filling it in is the hard part. Almost any spreadsheet works for the first week and dies by the end of the month, because every entry means opening the file, finding the row and picking a category from a long list.
So a good template is not the one that does the most, but the one where recording an expense is easiest.
Seven columns and no more
7 columns
On the expenses sheet
Everything else is calculated from them
10–12
Categories
Fewer explains nothing, more does not get filled in
3 sheets
Income, expenses, summary
The summary builds itself
- Date. Without it there is no month and no comparison.
- Who spent it. In a family this is the key question, and it cannot be reconstructed later.
- Account. Card, cash, joint account — so the balances match.
- Category. From a short list, not fifty options.
- Amount.
- Essential or not. This column is nearly always forgotten, and it is exactly the one that shows where the slack is.
- Note. What was bought, for when the amount surprises you a month later.
Three sheets
Income: everything that came in — salaries, side jobs, benefits. Only what reached the account, not the figure in the contract.
Expenses: every expense on its own row, with those seven columns.
Monthly summary: the total per category, what share of income it is, and how much is left. Nobody fills this sheet in by hand — it is built with formulas from the other two.
Which formulas you need
Three, and they are enough:
- Total per category for the month: the sum of that category on the expenses sheet.
- Share of income: the category total divided by the month's income. Comparing shares between months is more honest than comparing amounts, because shares do not depend on inflation.
- What is left per day: the free money left, divided by the days remaining in the month. It is the only number worth remembering every day.
How many categories to have and how to split them is in how to make a personal budget. What a filled-in month looks like, with real shares, is in monthly family budget example.
When the spreadsheet stops working
A spreadsheet works while one person runs the budget, in one currency, from a computer. It starts to break in three cases:
- Two people record expenses. One has the file open, the other's expense waits until evening and is forgotten.
- Several currencies. The exchange rate in the formula moves and past months start showing different amounts.
- The spending happens on a phone and the spreadsheet lives on a computer. The entry gets put off, and what is put off gets lost.
The honest comparison of when a spreadsheet wins and when an app does is in a spreadsheet or an app for budgeting.
If you want the table without the manual entry
In Caudal expenses are recorded from a phone in a couple of taps, each category can be marked essential or not, and the Family section shows who spends what. The table does not disappear either: in settings you can download every transaction as a CSV, or the "categories by month" summary — exactly the summary sheet, only filled in by itself.
How to run the budget between two people is in how to run a household budget.
Common questions
- What columns should a family budget template have?
- Seven: date, who spent it, account, category, amount, whether the expense is essential, and a note. Everything else — totals, shares, what is left — is calculated from those with formulas.
- How many categories should a family budget have?
- Ten to twelve. With fewer you cannot see where the money goes; with more, choosing the category takes longer than recording the expense and the sheet stops being filled in.
- Is a spreadsheet or an app better for a family budget?
- A spreadsheet works while one person runs it in one currency from a computer. If two people record expenses, there are several currencies, or spending is logged from a phone, an app usually lasts longer.
Try it on your own money
Caudal is an expense tracker in Spanish, English and Russian. Several currencies, goals, debts, a shared household budget. Recording an expense takes three seconds.
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