Budget Tracker in Notion + Template
I have been tracking my spendings since 2018th. Sometimes I paused it but mostly I was disciplined enough.
I used different tools and once Notion entered my life I decided to give it a try. Notion is good for many things but it was tough with expenses. Mainly because of Notion mobile experience. To quickly add an expense via the mobile app was a pain. But after months of experiments I eventually came up with the system that I really like.
I add my expenses manually so there is no automation magic yet. But after 4 years of expenses tracking I have developed kind of a habit to write them down. Another reason why I am okay to keep tracking manually is that last year I changed my approach to finance tracking and now I may let myself pause expenses tracking for some months.
Well, it’s better to show than talk, so let’s dive into this expenses tracker. I would prefer to keep some of my crazy expenses under wraps so I will use demo data here.
Mobile Friendly view for adding expenses
This view was the game changer for me. Without this view I would eventually give up and return to CoinKeeper or Google Sheet.
I have a widget for this view on my phone screen so I can easily access it and then I tap “+” for the necessary category and add amount spent.
Sometimes I do not add title to this new record as I actually do not need titles for groceries or dining spendings.
The main idea here is to use subgrouping by categories and configuring filter for “today”. Thus every new record added through this view will automatically be linked to the corresponding category and today’s date. And Notion allows to bring to the top the most used categories which is quite helpful here.
Monthly reports
As you could notice on the screenshots above, there is a month card which tells me how much is spent in current month. I have a separate database for month reports and every expense record is linked to its corresponding month.
Thus I can see my monthly spendings and an overall year sum. Seeing monthly spendings help me to predict the living cost for future months.
Month page contains a list of all the linked expenses. I rarely use it but sometimes I want to see how expenses for some categories has changed. Usually I find it interesting in the context of inflation rate changes.
Budget tracking
I aim to stay within some particular spending limits. To keep it simple I set an overall limit for a month. And I still can see spendings for different categories in a particular month page if I need it.
As I am a big fan of data visualisation and progress bars, I added progress bars to keep track of my monthly spendings and be aware if I am close to the limit. You could see the screenshot of months reports above, there are progress bars on the cards.
And in my daily life I do not need to see progress bars for all the months but want to see how healthy is my budget situation for the current month. That is why on the main system page and on the mobile adopted page I only see card for the current month.
Errors catching
Having monthly reports adds a bit more complexity as I have to link all the expenses to their corresponding months. To keep it simple I configure the filter on my phone view to point to the current month.
Thus I don’t have to manually add month link for every single expense but there is still a drawback: I have to manually update the filter every new month. And of course I always forget to do it. That is why I designed my tracker to leave me no chances to forget.
I added Errors’ property to expenses database. This property is a formula which checks if date of expense and month report link are consistent along with some other small checks. And once I see this error I know that I have to update the month link in the filter.
I love this trick with checking for errors in Notion systems and use it a lot. And ofter I build a separate page for fixing all errors at once.
Template and other links
Ok, done with talking. Here is the template if you would like to try it:
And here is instruction on configuring mobile friendly view for your existing expenses tracking system:
If you would love to master Notion databases to be able to build such systems, join my Notion class where together we will build a cool habit tracker and learn all the tricks needed to master simple and complex systems in Notion:
And share how you use Notion (or other app?) for expenses tracking in comments. And I would also be happy to hear why you do that and how it helps you.
