A spending tracker spreadsheet, and the month you stop filling it in
A free template you can import into Excel or Google Sheets, the four columns that decide whether it is useful, and an honest account of how long it will last.
By António Avelar Updated 22 August 2026 4 min read
Here is the template: expense-tracker.csv. Open it in Excel, Numbers, or File → Import in Google Sheets. It is a plain CSV on purpose — no macros, no locked cells, nothing that breaks when you change a column.
What follows is why it has the columns it has, and what to expect from it.
The eight columns, and why
Most templates you find have either three columns or thirty. Neither works. Three cannot answer a question; thirty do not get filled in.
| Column | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Date | Sorting, and finding what recurs monthly |
| Account | Which bank or card. Skip this and you cannot reconcile against a statement |
| Description | The raw line as it appears on the statement, kept verbatim |
| Merchant | What it actually was. This is a different column from Description, and that is the point |
| Category | Eight to twelve of them, no more |
| Fixed or variable | The column almost everyone leaves out, and the one that makes the sheet worth keeping |
| Amount | One column. Income positive, spending negative |
| Notes | Anything you will not remember in June |
Three of those deserve a defence.
Description and Merchant are separate. The statement says CT 4471 LISBOA 0821. The merchant is the supermarket at the end of your street. Keep the raw line so you can find the transaction again on the statement, and keep the merchant so the totals mean something. Overwriting one with the other is the most common way a tracker becomes impossible to audit.
Amount is one column, not two. Separate income and expense columns feel tidier and make every formula twice as long. Negative numbers for spending means the month’s net position is one SUM.
Fixed or variable is not optional. A category total tells you that you spent €430 on the house. Splitting it into what is committed and what is a choice tells you what you can actually change this month, which is the only reason to look. Fixed vs variable spending works through the distinction and where the awkward cases go.
The rule that breaks most spreadsheets
Money you move between your own accounts is not spending. Transfer €300 from the current account to savings and a naive tracker records €300 of outgoings; if the savings side is also in the sheet, it records €300 of income too. Do that a few times a month and both totals are inflated by a number that describes nothing.
The template gives transfers their own category so you can exclude them from every spending sum. Why transfers are not spending covers the variants — credit-card payments, moving money to a partner, cash withdrawals — that catch people out.
How long it will last
Honestly: about five weeks, and that has nothing to do with you.
Filling it in costs a few minutes every day and pays nothing until the end of the month. The weeks with the most transactions to enter are the weeks you are busiest. Once you are three weeks behind, catching up is a two-hour reconstruction from memory, and it does not happen. This is so consistent that it is better understood as a property of manual tracking than as a personal failing — the same curve kills the app version.
So use it with that in mind. Two honest ways to get value out of a sheet you will not keep forever:
Do one complete month, deliberately. Not as a habit — as an audit. One month, every line, properly categorised. You will learn more from that single finished month than from four abandoned ones, and you will have a baseline to compare against later.
Use it for the things nothing else can see. Cash, a private loan, the value of your car, a property. These never arrive automatically anywhere, and a small sheet holding only them stays small enough to maintain.
If what you want is the monthly picture without the data entry, the columns above are exactly what an account connection produces on its own — dated, named, categorised, with transfers already excluded. The template is here either way, and the spreadsheet versus an app makes the case for keeping the method while handing off the typing.