Create a budget worksheet in Excel and track where money is going.
Whether you're trying to cut down employee expenses or track where business funds are going each month, creating a worksheet is an ideal way to view expenditures. With Microsoft Excel, included in the Microsoft Office Suite, you're able to create a custom spreadsheet detailed to your company and track where that money is going. Create spreadsheets for individual departments within the organization or develop one spreadsheet to track overall funds.
Instructions
1. Open Microsoft Excel, which automatically starts a new, blank spreadsheet on the workspace. Click into the first row, row 1, and type the name of the spreadsheet, such as "Grandpa's Carvings Inc. Monthly Budget Total."
2. Click into the third row, second cell, B3. Type the first area of expenses for the business, such as "Salary." Press the "Tab" key on the keyboard to move into the next cell to the right and type another expense, such as "Facility." Continue to tab over, adding more cell headers such as "Insurance," "Materials," "Donations" and "Travel."
3. Click the cursor into the fourth cell of the first column, A4. Type a department name, such as "Human Resources" or "Programmers" or names of actual employees who have purchasing/spending power within the organization. Press the "Enter" key to drop into the cell below, A5, and add another name. Continue adding names and pressing "Enter" until all factions involved with company spending are listed on the sheet.
4. Highlight all of the names in the first column. Right-click and select "Format Cells." Click the "Fill" tab and click a lightly colored square to shade the names and make them stand out. Click the "Font" tab, increase the number in the "Size" column and select "Bold" for the "Font style" column. Click the "OK" button and the changes are applied.
5. Highlight the expense headers in row 3 and perform the same formatting. Highlight the title of the worksheet and perform the same formatting, but increase the size of the words slightly larger than the headers so the title stands out.
6. Highlight the cells of one column under a column header along with the blank cell at the bottom of the column, such as all of the cells under "Salary." Click the "Home" tab at the top of the screen. Click the "AutoSum" button, which has a small Greek "sigma" symbol on the right side of the ribbon/toolbar at the top of the screen. The cell fills with "=SUM()." This means the worksheet will auto-calculate and total the numbers when you input them into the spreadsheet, giving you a monthly total for the column. Repeat the highlighting and "AutoSum" process for each column.
7. Highlight each of the new "AutoSum" cells, which are in a row, plus one blank cell. Click the "AutoSum" button one more time. This will create a grand total of all of the columns, which will show the exact amount spent that month. The total appears in the blank cell. This number may be compared to the monthly number typed in the "Total" of the worksheet header (see the final step).
8. Click the "File" tab, select "Save As," type a title for the spreadsheet and save it to the computer.
9. Open the spreadsheet each month and type the month's budget maximum amount to be spent next to the word "Total" in the spreadsheet header. For example: "Grandpa's Carvings Inc. Monthly Budget Total November $1,800." Input the fiscal data, then save the spreadsheet with a new name or version number, such as "BudgetNov2010." The original worksheet remains the template to use each time.
Tags: blank cell, track where, amount spent, AutoSum button, Budget Total, Carvings Monthly