Bottom Line: This Excel tutorial teaches you how to create a full-blown personal budget management template in Excel. It will allow you to set up a zero-based budget plan over multiple periods and track your money flows with ease. The budget dashboard will bring all your data together and enables the most insightful monitoring of your personal budget performance.
Skill Level: Advanced
Video Tutorial
A personal budget is one of the most fundamental and powerful tools for actively taking control over your personal finances, as it helps you to understand and to pro-actively plan where your money goes.
While many people already use Excel to build simple expense trackers for themselves, this tutorial will take it to a new level and show you how to build a full-blown personal budget management tool in Excel that let’s you pro-actively plan your income allocation to custom expense and savings categories for every single month, then let’s you track and assign your actual money flows to the defined categories and based on that automatically generates a well-structured and interactive dashboard analysis with a detailed breakdown of your budget performance for each individual month and year.
This tutorial teaches every single step on how to create such an advanced and well-thought-out personal budget management spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. Along the way you will learn a ton of high-level Excel skills such as how to
- systematically set up and design an extended professional Excel tool from scratch
- create understandable and reusable formula constructs based on named calculations
- design outstanding interactive charts to visualise the most important KPIs in your data
- how to set up multi-level dropdown list constructs that with a dynamic list input
- how to apply smart conditional formatting rules for data visualization and
- and much more…

The final Ultimate Excel Personal Budget has the following main features:
- Budget Planning
- Zero-based budget planning
- Fully customizable income, expenses, and savings categories
- Multi-period approach to set the right expectations for every single month
- Budget Tracking
- Smart table to assign all your money flows to your defined categories
- Option to “shift” late monthly income to the next month
- Budget Dashboard
- Dynamic aggregation of all planned and tracked data
- Smart budget breakdown and chart visualizations
- Fully interactive for selecting different period and visualization views