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  • MaddieM4MaddieM4
    Aug 14, 2026, 5:51 PM

    Well, today's budgeting was a bit late - didn't wake up early this morning - and I found myself so disgusted by the prospect of maintaining two budget spreadsheets that I just figured out a good workflow and finished my local one. It's entirely caught up. I retroactively know the exact dollar and cent amounts in my accounts on August 1st. I figured out date formatting so it would include the short weekday. I can focus on one account at a time and entirely transcribe history. All of this is going to pay off for incremental updates, too.

    I'm still figuring out how best to do future projected expenses, but I have some ideas. Will pursue next.

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Replies

  • MaddieM4MaddieM4
    Aug 14, 2026, 6:38 PM

    I am so annoyed I can't really share screenshots (private info, c'est la vie), but I have future projections sorted out. I leave regions of blank rows in the transaction history between sections, so I can have a copy-pasteable month of expenses ready to go at all times.

    This approach works because the core math heavy-lifter in this spreadsheet design is `SUMIF`, either used to get all transaction deltas <= a target date, or = it. Transactions can be spatially in any random order, and the analytical math doesn't care.

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  • Hey Guselebertus@eigenmagic.net
    Aug 14, 2026, 7:34 PM

    @MaddieM4 my brain would sidequest into templating the spreadsheet so I could share it with someone else to use (they wouldn't) haha.

    I'd catch myself half way through and say wtf are you doing.. get on task pal

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  • MaddieM4MaddieM4
    Aug 14, 2026, 7:56 PM

    @elebertus Hehe, exactly. It's not that I didn't... briefly... think about it. But the tradeoff that allows spreadsheets to be such a straightforward and layperson-friendly compute tool is that they take the data-vs-process axis of distinction and smash it flat with a granite boulder.

    In most programming contexts, that's exactly the kind of think I rail against! It's one of the flaws I perceive with OOP, for example. Spreadsheets escape my ire here though, by gaining a different axis of expressiveness (spatial reasoning) and having an implied complexity ceiling beyond which you're just kind of expected to use a more advanced tool.

    By the time you're trying to reintroduce a data-vs-process hard line in spreadsheets, you might as well switch to Python w/ Pandas or similar. It's a yellow flag that you're outgrowing what sheets excel at 😜

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