Yearly ledger

How this calculator works

A budget is your plan; a ledger is what really happened. Each month, enter what you paid for every bill, grouped into credit cards, loans and rent, utilities, car gas, taxes, insurance, and other expenses. The ledger totals every item for the year, every group for each month, and your total spending, so you can spot bills that creep up, seasonal costs like summer power or winter heating, and months that ran over. Keeping a ledger year after year is one of the simplest habits for staying in control of your money, and you can download it to open in Excel.

A worked example

Suppose it is the first weekend of February. You open your January statements and type what you actually paid into the January column: $212 for power, $1,800 for rent, $640 on the first credit card, and so on down the list. That takes about fifteen minutes. You do the same thing in March for February.

By summer the ledger starts to tell you things a budget cannot. The power line shows the jump from spring to July. The insurance row shows the renewal that went up. The bottom row shows that three months ran well above the others, and the "Average per month" figure gives you a real number for what your life costs, built from what happened and not from a guess.

How to read your results

The summary at the top shows your total so far this year, how many months you have entered, and your average per month. The average only counts months with entries, so it stays accurate while the year is still in progress. The chart ranks your items by year total, which makes the largest costs obvious.

In the table, read across a row to follow one bill through the year, and read down a column to see everything a single month cost. Use the year buttons to move between years. When you start a new year, the ledger carries over the same items with empty months, so the rows line up year after year.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Entering what you expected to pay. The value of a ledger is that it records reality. Copy the amounts from statements, even when they are embarrassing.
• Waiting until the end of the year. Twelve months of statements is a chore that never gets done. Once a month, on a set day, is easy.
• Splitting the list too finely. Forty rows are hard to keep up. If you pay most daily spending by card, one row per card is enough.
• Keeping the only copy in one browser. Your entries live on your own device. Download a backup file or export the year to Excel now and then.