Tracking Expenses in App, Excel, Template, Budgeting, Benefit for Small Business
There is a popular saying that “the easiest way of becoming bankrupt is by not paying attention to your expenses.” There is nothing that captures the importance of keeping track of your expenses better than that saying.
In life, if you are continually in debt, it means you do not pay enough attention to how you spend your money. It’s important to monitor spending so as to avoid falling into a nasty financial situation.
People purchase many things over the course of a month. It may just be a packet of gum, a newspaper, an ice cream, or even clothing and household items. At the end of the month, when you evaluate your purchases, you may discover you’ve made more than 50 purchases just in one month.
At that rate if you do not track your expenses, it’s easy to go overboard, beyond your income.
Tracking your expenses involves identifying your expenditures throughout the month. It's an essential activity that you should ideally do every day throughout the month.
It may seem like a lot of work to itemize your expenses when you first begin, but understanding why it's important to track expenses and how to do so with minimal effort can help you successfully commit to the activity and become more aware of your spending.
Why Track Your Spending?
Being aware of our spending habits is the best way of utilizing our money. When you know how much money you spend, it’s easy to balance your income with your spending and even save for the future.
If you operate a budget; (daily, monthly or even annual), the best way of ensuring that your spending is within the budget is by tracking your spending. When you track your spending, you know where your money goes and you can ensure that your money is used wisely.
Tracking your expenditures also allows you to understand why you’re in debt and how you got there. This will then help you design a befitting strategy of getting out of debt.
Monitoring your expenses throughout the month holds you accountable for your finances in a few key ways.
It Helps You Stick to Your Budget
After you set up a budget, which is a monthly plan for spending that takes into account your income and expenses, tracking expenses daily is essential to keeping you on that budget. If you don't track your money, you won't know when to stop spending in a given category (food or clothing, for example).
At the end of each month, review the expenses you tracked to compare what you spent versus what you planned to spend according to your budget. If you overspent, look for ways to cut spending in a certain category. If you spent too little, you might want to allocate more to savings and debt repayment. In either case, you'll want to use what you learn from tracking expenses and factor in any life changes (marriage or a new child, for example) to make changes to the budget for next month that put you on better financial footing.
For example, tracking your expenses might reveal that you budgeted too little for food or neglected to budget for one-time expenses such as holiday gifts, in which case you can incorporate these infrequent expenses and build a more realistic, comprehensive budget for the next month.
Tracking Your Expenses Can Reveal Spending Issues
Another reason you must identify your expenditures throughout the month is to become more aware of your spending habits. If you don’t know where your money is going, you won’t be able to recognize negative spending behaviours that you can easily change to make your money work for you.
For example, you might learn from tracking your expenses that you are paying monthly for a service you don't use (an unused gym membership, for example), in which case you could cancel the service or switch to a cheaper one. Or, you might realize that your habit of dining out or buying clothing from expensive brands is causing you to run out of money by the month's end.
Tracking your spending can also help you identify serious problems in how you manage your money. For example, as you gauge your expenses over a period of months or even years, you might observe that your annually increasing monthly rent now makes up an outsized percentage of your monthly income or that you aren't earning enough to lead the lifestyle you imagined. To correct problems like these, you might have to make more drastic life changes such as moving to a more affordable residence or getting a second job to earn more money.
It won't be easy, but it will be worthwhile if it puts you on track financially.
It Forces You to Prioritize
You have a finite amount of money to allocate to certain categories, based on what you earn. Laying out your expenses will force you to prioritize where you want your money to go.
Mindlessly spending on things isn’t going to get you where you need to go. You need a plan, and tracking your spending is one way to create that plan.
If you want to accelerate saving or paying down debt, having a clear picture of your finances will also help you to determine how you can make either a priority.
It Helps You Meet Your Financial Objectives
It's not enough to stick to your budget if you don't also make strides toward important saving goals. Whether you set a goal to build an emergency fund, pay down debt, set aside money for retirement, or save for college, vacation, or other short-term goals, you're more likely to achieve these goals if you budget for them, create a savings plan, and then track your spending to ensure that your spending matches your priorities.
If it's your highest priority to pay down high-interest debt, for example, include debt repayment as a fixed expense in your budget. Contribute the budgeted amount toward that debt every month and then track your spending to make sure that you paid down as much debt as you had planned.
Once you pay it off, start on other goals that you couldn't fund while you were in debt, such as investing for retirement.
It Keeps You Conscious of Your Bank Balance
It goes without saying, but you have to be tracking your expenses for a reason. Usually, to keep yourself accountable.
If you’re making X, and spending Y, then X – Y should hopefully be a positive number. If it’s not, you’re in trouble, and your bank account might be, too.
When you track your spending, you want to make sure you’re spending less than you earn, or at the very least, less than what you have saved. Otherwise, you might encounter some nasty overdraft fees, and end up in the red. Those fees are not worth paying, so stay on top of your expenses and know what’s left in your account when you go to make a purchase.
You’ll Be Aware of Questionable Charges
If you’re not checking your bank account or your credit card statements, there could be fraudulent charges that you’re missing.
Imagine your hard-earned money being siphoned away because your card information was stolen. Not good!
You could also potentially get double-charged for something. If you have any of your bills on auto-pay, you should check in just to make sure the correct amount is being debited.
Additionally, if you’ve waited a while to track your spending, you might have some recurring charges that you’ve forgotten about. While they’re not questionable, you’re essentially throwing money out the window if you’re being charged for a random subscription you no longer use.
It Allows You to Take Control
Tracking your spending ultimately allows you to take control of your financial situation. Knowing where your money is going is empowering.
Why? If you haven’t noticed by now, there’s a lot that tracking your spending can do for you.
It can curb impulse spending, help you achieve your financial goals, cut unnecessary purchases out of your budget, force you to focus on what is worth spending your money on, and overall, will make managing your money easier. It will also help you stay out of debt, as you (hopefully) won’t be spending more than you earn.
Once you piece together your expenses and know where your money is going, you can move it around and adapt your spending if and when your situation changes. You are in control.
Methods for Keeping Track of Expenses
While a few approaches can help streamline and speed up the process of identifying expenditures, the best approach is one that you feel comfortable enough with to stick to every day.
Record Expenses with Pen and Paper
If you prefer a tech-free solution for tracking your expenses, write down every penny that you spend and where you spent it in a notebook. Consider reserving a page for each spending category in your budget, or use one page and simply note the category next to each expenditure. This no-fuss approach can tell you at a glance where your money is going. Although it may be more difficult to identify spending trends on paper, the method at least makes you more aware of your spending.
Using Credit Card Statements
Using your credit or debit card statements allows you to employ the advantage of technology and saves you the stressful diligence of writing down every purchase. At the end of the month, you’d use your credit or debit card statement to track your expenditure.
But this method isn’t complete because it doesn’t capture the cash purchases you may periodically make.
Make It Easier with an App or Software
A more modern and convenient way to track your expenses is in a spreadsheet or a web-based financial app. Online apps may even offer colorful graphs and charts to illustrate your spending habits, but both options allow you to quickly and easily enter your purchases in a spending category on the same day that you incur them.
Work Together as a Couple
If you are in a relationship and have combined finances, you will both need to track your expenses. It's a good idea to choose an online app or another expense-tracking method that can sync your spending with your spouse's spending so that you don't blow your budget.
Smartphone apps for couples allow you to track your spending on the go. This can prevent the two of you from spending in the same category at the same time and will give you a sense of how much you have left in a specific category so that you can stick to your budget.
Unlike the balance at the ATM, which may not show transactions that haven't cleared in your bank unless it displays the "available" balance in addition to the "actual" or ledger balance, apps often track your expenses as you incur them so that you know when to stop spending.6
Keep Going Even When You Overspend
When tracking your expenses reveals that you overspent in a few categories, it can be tempting to stop identifying expenditures and try again next month. But it's important to continue to track your expenses throughout the month so that you can identify what you need to change and by how much.
The activity shouldn't take more than a few minutes each day if you adopt an expense-tracking approach that works for you, but if you consistently track your expenses, you will be able to save more, spend less, and make other necessary changes to finances that will allow you to build wealth and go after the things you want in life.
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