Executive Summary
Over the past few years I have tried to make and follow a family budget using an Excel
spreadsheet. In each attempt, I have been foiled by the tedious nature of manually updating
the budget. In any given month we could have anywhere between 50 and 100 different entries
to enter into the spreadsheet. Predictably, these attempts to manually track my family’s
finances have been met with failure. Automating this process makes tracking finances much
easier and allows more time to analyze expenditures and determine areas of improvement.
This spreadsheet greatly reduces the data entry portion of personal financial tracking by
automating the process. The user enters login information for mint.com through a user form
and the spreadsheet imports all transactions from the website. The spreadsheet then filters all
transactions and compiles a table of all income and expenses from the data. For written
cheques and other uncategorized transactions, the user has the ability to classify those
transactions or leave them as “other” expenses. Finally, the user can create a budget for any
given period of time to see how actual spending compares to the budgeted amounts.
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