Budget Tracking with Google Sheets, Google Forms, Siri Shortcuts (WIP)

Google Sheets + Forms Setup to track expenses quickly and effectively without other 3rd party apps/dependencies. Keep track of Income/Expense of different kinds, Credit Card usage, Budget targets all in one spreadsheet. Here's how this works

• Google Sheets to track and maintain expenses (and income).
• Google Form to quickly record expenses (and income).
• Both of these are web-based environments and therefore work super well as app-like shortcuts on your mobile homescreen.
• New - Use Google Data Studio to turn your Google Sheet into a beautiful dashboard

Forms + Sheets + Data Studio Workflow

        

Siri Shortcuts Integration (Work in progress)

            

Google Sheets (Link to view spreadsheet)

Check out different tracking sheets. If you'd like to use this same sheet as a template, follow along. If you were just looking for some inspiration, feel free to integrate things you like here into your own personal finance management system.

Google Forms (Link to create your own copy)

The complete form is also shared as a PDF in the samples folder.

How to set this up?

• Make sure you're logged into your Google Drive

• Create copies of the sheet and the form. Here's how:

  • Open the google sheet using this link.
  • File -> Make a copy
  
  • Note: This option is only accessible when you're logged into your Drive account.
  • The Form link should directly suggest creating a copy once logged in.
  

• It's time to link your form to the spreadsheet.

  • Open your copy of the Form, head to the Responses tab, click on the green Create Spreadsheet button
  
  • Here, choose your copy of the Google spreadsheet in the Drive.
  • We're almost there.

• If you look at your spreadsheet closely, it now has a new sheet called Form Responses. This is the one we'll link to the back-end.

  
  • Rename this sheet to something simpler like res (I'm avoiding using responses because it's already there)
  
  • Head over to the sheet called _responses and in the first cell A1, change the formula to =ARRAYFORMULA(res!A:I)

  

  • We basically asked the back-end sheets to switch to the data in res (instead of the older responses)

• At this point, the dashboard and the rest of the sheets will look empty, so go ahead and fill out your form

• Open your form and fill out your first expense. (you can also click on the preview button and then fill it there)
• This should populate the sheet as expected

• Once the sheet+form setup is working, go ahead and customize the options in the google form, names of your credit cards, your spending categories, etc.
  • Note: Do remember that changing the sequence / number of questions in the form will affect everything! If doing this, be careful, and always make sure to check that the filters are using the correct column sequences.
• Happy Tracking!

Quick Update!

There's a more mobile-friendly way of looking at the budget sheet. You can create beautiful dashboards with minimal effort that look like this:

Check this out if you're interested in setting it up.

Bonus: Siri (WIP)

Filling out the form too frequently can become cumbersome and that is one of the major drawbacks of a system like this one. A potential solution is setting up Siri to guide me through the form filling process - this is much more User Friendly than scrolling/clicking/typing inside the browser. Here's the video of this in action.

The best part - this works hands-free, so it's easy to track expenses while you're on the move. The template for this isn't quite ready yet but it's can be set up if you know your way around Forms + Siri Shortcuts. I'll share a more user-friendly template soon.

Get Siri Shortcuts to work right away

• Download my .shortcut file and import into Siri Shortcuts.
• Get a pre-filled URL to your Google Form. It will look similar to the one inside the shortcut
• Separate out various elements and update entry IDs inside the shortcut
• This might take some effort right out the box

If you found this helpful, I look forward to hearing from you. Always up for a coffee.