Budget Tool!

I built a budgeting tool using Google Sheets and Apps Script!. I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet budget since high school. None of the fancier budget tools out there have ever worked quite right for me, so I stick with the hands-on approach. It started with a vanilla Excel spreadsheet, and then a Google Sheet once I had a spouse to share it with. In those legacy versions I’d been collecting transactions from each of my accounts, categorizing them, and then copying them over myself into the sum for that month’s category. That worked well enough for years, but I could feel it getting burdensome as my accounts and monthly expenses increased over time. That pain, plus some down time as I transitioned jobs in November, bore out this iteration: automatic aggregating of categories and some helpful validity checks. I’ve published a version mostly to make sharing easier with friends and family. The way Apps Scripts works for non-enterprise users (i.e. me), permissions are intimidatingly all-or-nothing, so I’m not expecting any sort of public adoption today. But if others find it useful, all the better!

Written on December 30, 2021