Somewhat Useful

In the first two parts of this series, we looked at ways to create and maintain a budget online both by automatic transfer of data from your bank and by manual or semi-manual entry.  Both of these methods have inherent strengths and weaknesses, one concern being the security of data stored online.  In this final article on creating a budget, we’ll look at a few online sources to obtain spreadsheet templates for use completely offline - thus negating any potential online data security concerns.

Microsoft Office Online Templates – Of course, this article wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t mention the great behemoth itself.  Microsoft Office’s online templates area contains a huge number of templates for pretty much every business or personal need you could think of – and budgeting is no exception.  As of this writing, there were over 90 different templates under the “Budgets” category, many of which were submitted by the users of Microsoft’s Office products themselves.  The templates are community rated, so you can get a feel for how well designed and useful the templates; you also get to see a screenshot of each template right from the site.  Most of the budget templates are designed for Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet program, but there were a few designed for other Office products as well.  The templates are free to download and use, provided you have a valid licensed copy of Microsoft Office.

Spreadsheet 123 – This spreadsheet-oriented site seems to concentrate on Microsoft Excel, but unlike the Microsoft site, you are not required to have a license to use these templates and they should work equally well with any compatible spreadsheet program, like the very popular Open Office.  The Spreadsheet 123 site has a page specifically for budget templates, and the selection of templates, while much more sparse than Microsoft’s, contains sheets designed for a nice variety of uses and purposes.  While we’re concentrating on Monthly Budget-type templates in this article, you should also have a look at Spreadsheet 123’s budget templates for other needs such as Retirement budgeting and Parties.  The sheets look professionally designed and easy to use, but a couple of the download links that I tried to access while researching this article were broken and returned nothing but an error page – hopefully, it was just a temporary problem.  Other than that, Spreadsheet 123 is a great place to find an easy to use, free template for laying out your monthly finances.

Vertex42 – The last site I looked at had the fewest budget templates of all the sites I visited, but they were repeatedly referenced by other blogs and sites as a great source for budgeting templates.  Vertex 42 is an Excel-oriented website that has a good number of Excel templates and calculators in a variety of categories.  Invoicing, Loan Calculators, Employee Time Sheets and, of course, Budgets are all template types you’ll find here, each one laid out by category and including a small screenshot to give you an idea of the design of each one.  The “budgets” category contains six templates, including a “Wedding” and “Business” budget, and each appears to be extremely well designed, user-friendly, and eye-pleasing.  Though the choices aren’t as numerous as on the other sites, Vertex42 seems to be popular for a reason, and well worth your time to take a look.

Using an offline spreadsheet for a budget has the advantage that none of your personal information or transactions are ever transmitted across the internet, so security is extremely high (especially if you protect your spreadsheet with a password).  The disadvantage, of course, is that the more powerful reporting, analysis, and charting options that you’d receive with an online solution will be missing from your offline spreadsheet, unless of course you take the time to design the reports and charts yourself.  There’s also the simple fact that an offline spreadsheet is not available from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, so there’s the portability factor to consider as well.  These trade-offs, however, are well worth it to those for whom data security is of the highest concern.

There are, of course, other offline solutions, like the ever-popular Quicken suite of applications and open-source favorite GnuCash, but those are tailored more to transaction recording and analysis and, while they may include budgeting functions, aren’t budgeting solutions in and of themselves in my opinion.  In the end, the decision on how to budget and if to record individual transactions for that purpose is a personal one; my personal recommendation is to start as small as you feel comfortable and, if needed, move into a larger or more complicated solution as your needs grow.

What did you think of this series on budgeting?  Was it useful?  Was there any information or resources we completely overlooked?  Let us know all about it by hammering out a comment below!