Mac Numbers Personal Finance Template is an innovative application that gives users the ability to follow their budgets easily. It is a comprehensive budgeting solution, which has been developed exclusively for Mac OS users. This platform allows you to organize all types of information ranging from different financial plans and categories to other personal details. The software can be used for creating invoices, arranging budgets, tracking expenses and many other purposes. The best thing about this application is that it allows you to work on multiple documents simultaneously, without worrying about any loss of data or formatting issues. In fact, the program can handle unlimited numbers of files with all modified contents intact at all times
Mac Numbers Personal Finance Template: A Personal Budget Template Apple Numbers is needed by almost everyone today, who has an interest in personal finance. This template is very simple to use, but effective enough to create a special budget, which is completely customized to your needs and preferences.
Being able to review and keep track of your financial records will surely help you make better and wiser financial decisions. Thus, having a budget that records your earnings, spending, and savings will help guide you on your decision-making process. Our ready-made Budget Templates that you can download in Apple Numbers have well-formatted content that you can easily customize to suit your purpose and goals. If you need a premium template for a budget summary, budget plan, budget tracking, budget proposal, etc., you can easily choose the perfect one from the wide selection that we offer. Get our free Budget Templates in Apple Numbers today to achieve the best quality finish in the most convenient way.
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How To Create A Budget Spreadsheet In Apple Numbers
Budgeting is a discipline that makes you wise in handling your money. Before you make any financial decisions, you need to check on your weekly, monthly, or yearly financial records. Thus, a simple and comprehensive personal budget sheet should always be on your side. For you to create a comprehensive financial record, here are a few steps and inclusions that you will need to take into consideration.
1. Determine Your Goal
Before you create your budget spreadsheet, it’s important to know your financial goals first. Decide whether you want to simply keep track of the ways you have collected your money, how they were used, or how will you spend your remaining financial resources for your next plan. Upon doing so, you must first determine what you want or what you need so that you can use your money appropriately. You may use it if you plan to purchase house supplies, then you might think of creating a household budget, or family budget, or If you want to rent a car, then create a budget plan for car rental; preferably choose those cheap car rentals.
2. List Your Monthly Income
The source of your monthly income may come from your school allowance if you’re a student, or from your “legit” salary if you have a regular job. If you receive your paycheck biweekly, then you would simply multiply the number by 2 and if it’s given to you weekly, then divide it by four, since the standard number of weeks in a month is four. This way, you will have a good extra amount throughout the year to help cover your annual expenses and record it accordingly in your expense statement.
3. Line Up Your Monthly Expense
Your monthly expenses could be the bills that you receive on a regular basis. These bills include gas, insurance, loan payment, electricity, water, etc. For you to effectively estimate your monthly expenses, create an expense sheet and list down the expected amount of money for these monthly expenses. Then, prioritize items by sorting out the things you absolutely needed the most and the ones you are committed to paying.
4. Look For A Sheet-Processing Software
You may choose MS Excel, Google Sheets, MS Word, or Apple Pages. As soon as you do, make sure you specify the thing you will need to include in your budget. For instance, provide two columns where you can list down all the things you’d include in your expenses then put the (expected) monetary value beside each. Then, you may shop for any built-in printable sample budget templates which are readily available in whichever software you choose.
5. Open Apple Numbers In Your MAC or PC
Now, it’s time to pull up Apple Numbers or any other budget apps on your MAC or PC and create a new file. To make your task a little easy, choose some of the ready-made budget planners or budget templates that are available Apple Pages. Then, once you feel that you are done, hit the “save” button. If you want to browse on your budget plan, while you go pay your expenses but forgot your phone, then common sense will tell you to print it out immediately.
How I Plan my Monthly Budget with Numbers
I use a minimalistic spreadsheet set up to track my monthly budget and spending
I’m a data scientist. That being said, I am not a huge fan of spreadsheets. Despite its impressive data handling and manipulation powers, Excel is not a tool I like to use unless I have no choice.
My sentiments toward spreadsheets changed when I started using the macOS app Numbers. It feels almost inappropriate to call Numbers documents spreadsheets.
Numbers, without oppressive row and column numbers framing the page and infinite grids eating up space, is a great way to stay organized without whacking out an Excel document. It allows you to collage together text, tables of any dimensions, images and charts. Furthermore, it is incredibly snappy and lightweight compared to its Microsoft counterpart.
With very little effort, I was able to combine two of the basic budget templates from Numbers into the spreadsheet pictured above.
In this article, I will show you:
- A brief tour of my spreadsheet
- How to build functionality into your own Numbers spreadsheet
Quick Tour of How I Organise my Budget
There are two tabs in my Numbers document. The Budget tab is shown before and the Transactions tab, is shown immediately above.
On the Transactions tab, I record my every transaction and parse it to a category (Groceries, Takeout, Travel etc). The categories can be selected from a drop-down menu and they link back to the Budget tab.
The two tabs, Budget and Transactions, are linked together so that my transactions in each category are summed up and presented next to my budget. The difference between the budget and real spend is also calculated so that I can keep track of my spending in real-time.
For example, I already went over my budget for takeouts this month. I still have £26 to spend on groceries, though.
Setting up these functionalities with Numbers is very easy and intuitive. Let’s go over how to create categories, sums and differences.
1. How to Create Pop-up Menus
In my transactions table, I have a drop-down menu of categories to choose from. To incorporate a drop-down menu in your own spreadsheet, select the cell where you want the menu to be and head to the right-hand side. Select Cell > Data Format, and change the type from Automatic to Pop-up Menu.
You will be able to add your menu options and then save. To apply these changes to the whole column, you can grab the corner of the cell and drag down.
I choose broad, general categories for my budget planning, especially during lockdown when my expenses are less varied. These categories link up to the ones in the budget table, so I have to make sure the spelling is the same and that there are no mismatched white spaces.
This month I went with Groceries, Takeout, Shopping, Oyster and Uber. I chose general budget labels for food and other shopping. However, I was more specific on transport, because I want to know how much I spent on public transport (Oyster) vs cabs (Uber).
2. How to Link Tables & Sum Over Categories
In the Actual column of the Budget table, each cell can be set up to sum up the corresponding expenses from the Transactions table.
For example, I used SUMIF to set up the calculation for actual spend on takeout. The first term of the function (Transactions::Category) specifies which column of the transactions table should be summed over.
The second term (in this case, cell A8), specifies which category in the Budget the function should be looking for in the Transactions. Make sure the spelling and white spaces are matching.
The third term ($Amount) specifies the column with the numbers to add up in the Transactions table.
These terms automatically light up in different colours so that you can track what goes into the formula easily and avoid mistakes.
3. How to Create Drop-down Sections
It can be useful to keep the budget table organized into subsections. For example, I keep my different Subscriptions grouped together and I update the Actual column only if I paid the specific subscription this month. Sometimes I like to discontinue my subscriptions to services, for example, if I know I won’t be using it or if I want to get a better deal.
To set this up, right-click on the row you want to group into a drop-down section and select Create Group for Row.
This will divide your table into two unnamed sections that you can personalize. Furthermore, it will add an extra column at the end to show the Category, for example Subscriptions or Savings.
Here is where you can create as many or as few categories as you like, for your own aesthetic pleasure. These subcategories do not communicate with the Transactions section. Instead, individual rows within these subcategories are linked up to the transactions, as seen above.
I personally like the appeal of collapsing different areas of expenditures so that I can concentrate on sections of my budget planning one at a time without getting overwhelmed.
Presently, I have my expenses divided between Housing, Savings, Credit Cards, Food, Travel, Shopping and Subscriptions. These categories often change as my lifestyle changes from month to month.
Other helpful tips
- Numbers calculates summary statistics when you select a group of cells. I use this on the fly, to check things like what was my total spend in the past week or past few days.
- You can sort the transactions table by group. I like to see all my grocery shopping entries one underneath the other at the end of the month, for example, to check how consistent my spending is in that area.
- You can add graphs and charts to visualize your budget. For example, this is a visualization of my total spending on Housing, with percentages.
This type of visualization is interesting to compare month by month. During the winter months, the percentage spent on Energy can be quite high. It should go down as the days become longer and the weather becomes warmer. Realistically, my energy spending will creep up from the 2% I budgeted to around 4% by the end of the month.
This is only one of the many use cases I have found for charts in Numbers. Another type of visualization I use is a multi-bar chart to compare the Budget vs Actual Spending columns of my spreadsheet at the end of the month to highlight any excess spending.
Main Takeaway
This software has helped me enjoy two of my most dreaded activities: keeping track of my money and using spreadsheets.
By using a combination of drop-down categories, pop-up menus and helpful formulas, I was able to build a simple, easy-to-use spreadsheet.
I spend about 5 minutes every other day updating my expenses to the transactions table. I also log the actual amount paid for my bills and credit cards as they leave my current account.
My template is available for download on Dropbox here.
Conclusion
Regardless of how much you earn, the budget planning stage is a crucial part of budgeting. There are several things you need to consider before starting personal finance plan template mac numbers. For instance, whether you have a lot of money to save in the future or if your savings should be used for paying bills, credit card debts and other daily expenditures.
Budgeting is a lifelong habit that takes some time to build. The key is to keep trying until you find a system and process that’s right for you. This mac template for personal finance covers some of the most useful financial tools available in Numbers. It includes examples of reports and templates, which you can use to analyze your income and spending requirements. The template also contains an example of a budgeting workbook, as well as a drop-down list that you can use to categorize your expenses.