Ever wondered where your hard earned money goes? It comes from your hard work and then just disappears at the end of the month, right? Luckily, tracking your cash outflow is not so hard and made simpler with the information era.
How great would it be, if by a click of mouse you can open a form that can take all the details of what you have spent and add the details to the end of a list, which you can analyze at your leisure – to figure out your expenses by month, by type etc.
Well, you can do that by using Google docs – spreadsheet forms with 4 simple steps. Doubt it? Take a look at expense tracker form that we have created here for you.
You will need a Google account for the below steps. They are available free of charge at www.google.com/ accounts/
1. First create a new Google docs – spreadsheet
Go to www.docs.google.com. Once you log in, click on the “forms” tab as shown below. This will open a new window where you can create a form. We will use this form to enter spending details.
2. Create a basic expenditure tracker form
We will now create a basic form with the following fields:
1. How much you spent?
2. What did you spent it on? A description for the spending
3. Category of spending A list of categories from which you can choose
The first step is to name the form:
Next we will add two simple questions as shown below, the process is very easy, just try it for yourself.
Finally we will save our expense tracking form. We can email it to ourself, or embed it in our igoogle home page.
Once we email it, we should have the below email in our inbox.
3. Now lets start entering expenses in our form
Click on the URL provided in the email and go to the live form to start entering!
Once you enter few expenses the spreadsheet will look like this:
See how Google adds the time stamp to each expense. This is a good thing as we dont have to enter the expense date. We can use this column to see how much you are spending everyday (provided we enter information as soon as possible)
4. Analyze the tracked expenses
What is the use of tracking when you are not analyzing. You can use built-in charts in Google docs to do some analysis of the expenses. I did a bar chart to show what is possible.
Take a test drive at the expense tracker form by accessing the one here:
Expense Tracker Form: http://bit.ly/h9aWfn
List containing the expenses entered in the form: http://bit.ly/ifpJFY
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