Do You Know How to Turn a List of Transactions into a Budget?

Assuming you have online banking and a typical credit card account, you can easily download csv files of all of your financial transactions into a spreadsheet. Once you add a column with a budget category label, you can use a simple tool called a pivot table to create a budget spreadsheet from this data. We wrote out the steps in our blog so that you can learn how to do it yourself. We even illustrated with a video that shows exactly how we did it.

http://www.budgetways.com/create-a-budget-spreadsheet-from-your-checking-account.html

Creating a Budget Template From Scratch

It's not really that hard to create your own budget template from scratch. You just need to choose a spreadsheet program and start making columns for each of your expenses and for your income. The hardest part is actually categorizing and fililng in those expenses. You'll need to track or download all of your checking, credit card and cash transactions and then enter them into your template in order to arrive at a starting point for your budget.

http://www.budgetways.com/how-to-create-a-budget-template-from-scratch.html