Final Result
TBD
Documentation
I wanted to create a budget tracker in Excel that would calculate my spending and keep track of wether I am on target or not to our planned budgeting. I've had apps in the past that do this for me and have found that they required some manual intervention that felt like I was paying for a service that solved a problem I could solve myself.
Upon starting I ran into the first issue which was that I didn't want to have to manually input the categories myself. I wanted a system where I could paste in my bank statements, and it would sort my spending for me.
I created this transactions page and a seperate sheet to act as a categories reference table.
(Private information has been blurred out)
That massive formula is really just 50 copies of the same problem being solved, one for each category, as I wanted room for up to 50 categories. It's looking in the 'Transaction Description' column to search for a keyword listed in a table on another sheet. The table is pictured below.
As you can see the Headers act as the categories and the values act as the keywords for the search in the 'Transactions' page to sort each transaction by Category automatically. You simply copy a key part of the bank statements transaction description and past it in as a keyword on the category table and save yourself hours upon hours of manual work.