How to EXCEL at Home

8 Ways Excel can Help Us Budget, Plan, and Keep Track at Home

What do you use excel for? Let’s be honest, when we hear the word Excel, we think of spreadsheets, office tasks, data, and budgets. But did you know that Excel has so many handy uses outside of the workplace?

Let’s look at the top templates in Excel that can help us to plan events, organise our never-ending to-do lists, stay on budget, and keep track of all we’ve got going on at home, and in our sports and social life.

1. Sports

The sports sign-up sheet template in Excel is great for recording team members for matches or training sessions, and for recording players, coaches, volunteers, and emergency contact info for young players. You can also track any fees or expenses for the sports team or club.

2. Events

Big events like a wedding can come with big pressure because there are lots of tasks and spending to keep on top of. Let Excel track the expenses, allocation, and completion of tasks, and keep you on budget.

Excel is also great for keeping track of gifts received and guest lists. There’s a template in Excel that will calculate how much you spend in each category, and it can show you the estimate versus actual costs, then calculate the difference.

3. Personal Finance

Excel can be used to create a simple personal cash flow statement, keeping track of money coming in and going out. A personal budget records your income, investment, saving, and expenses, and shows a cash balance.

Try the credit card tracker in Excel to keep up with changes, transaction fees, and payments to your credit card account. This gives you a running balance.

4. Car

The vehicle tracker template on Excel helps you to record mileage, expenses, servicing, and maintenance issues, as well as due dates for NCT, tax, and insurance.

If you drive for work, Excel can help you track personal mileage and detail trips with dates and fuel costs.

5. Retirement plan

The retirement plan Excel template allows you to plan for the future. You can set retirement goals, track how much you save or invest, and discover if you’re saving enough. The template allows you to calculate your required earnings and savings every year to hit your retirement goals.

6. Food budget

The current cost of living crisis means that we’re all paying attention to our food spending. You can track your household and grocery expenses using an Excel template, and break down the spending by category, and location. You can use the filtering buttons and reporting function to look at specific spending.

7. Back to school

Between the schoolbooks, stationery, uniforms, sports gear, fees, and voluntary charges, there’s a lot of expense associated with ‘back to school.’ Keep track using an Excel template. This can also be used to track term time expenses such as school trips and tours.

8. Family holiday checklist

When you travel, there’s always an endless list of things to buy, things to pack, and documents to check. Let Excel help you get organised and make your well-earned holiday go smoothly. You can stay on budget by tracking the expense of flights, hotels, and spending money.

Sharpening your Excel skills

Excel is not just for our workplace, there’s also a place for it at home. No matter what level you’re at with Excel – whether beginner, intermediate or advanced- there’s always room for improvement.

We can help you with Excel dashboards and reports, FlashFill, AutoFill, and more. We’ve got Excel tips, tricks, and shortcuts.

Our Microsoft-certified trainers are experts and can help you build the skills and confidence to master Excel. You can choose between full days and bite-size learning courses. We have in-person and on-site consultancy, face-to-face learning, webinars, or hybrid.

We also train in Outlook, PowerApps, Visio, Word, PowerPoint, and more.

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