Alan Roblou (Zebra) 07 January 1995. This spreadsheet sets out the whole year and projects your financial position at all points. As you go through the year you change the estimates for the real figures. It is the latest version of the method I have been using for several years and found simple and successful. I like it comes with the machine and because I can understand what is going on; no doubt it could be much improved by someone who really knows spreadsheets, which I dont. Its main disadvantage is filesize, but you do always have a year at your fingertips. I recommend you work from a copy and keep one version unchanged for the following years. It takes a long while to clean up a used year. The figures here are fictitous, but you can change most of the categories and amounts by altering columns A and B. These are the reference columns for the rest of the sheet. I would advise against opening and closing gaps except at the very beginning; this is a big sheet and the process takes a long while using a lot of memory. I normally keep the sheet on drive B, a 128K SSD. It grows to about 60K at year end. I make a backup every week by saving a .WKS version in internal memory and then moving it to my mains computer. How it is laid out: Each month has a column for writing in expenditure, but every item or section already has an estimate so you can see if you are going over (I always do!). The columns get their labels and estimates from reference columns A and B. They also get information like interest rates. It's also the place to note occasional spending like car tax. The first few lines of the column are the grand reckoning. They take last month's balance and compute this month's income and expenditure to give the new balance. They also give the following months to show any trend, and the year-end balance. The reckoning gets the income and spending figures from two sections at the bottom of each column. In between are sections for Visa, Barclaycard, store card (M&S) and cheques which includes variable direct debits. The Visa section is second because it is the most used for me. My bank debits my main account for the whole amount the following month. But you could modify this section by emulating the Barclaycard or M&S sections, which are different. The Visa section has a mechanism to estimate a certain minimum level of expenditure each month. The sheet uses the estimate for its calculations until the level is exceeded (it always is!), and then uses the real figure. When the bills come in it is easy to check spending against record. I then "lock" the section by replacing the sum cell formula with the real figure. I do the same thing with the other sections. Or you could use "Paste Special" to recopy the whole month without formulae; it replaces the whole month with the real figures. The Marks section simply totals the months spending, which is used in the following month's calculations. It can be simple because I pay the total each following month. The Barclaycard section is more complicated. It takes last month's balance, subtracts the payment (which is normally the same each month), adds this month's spending and interest, and reaches a new balance. If you make an extra payment the simplest thing is to include it as a negative spending entry. The formula looks to see if the balance is in the red before allowing for a payment and doesn't if it is a negative figure. The cheques section deals with cheques and I replace xxx with the last digits of the cheque number. I also include direct debits like the Mercury and BT charges, with estimates in place (all fictitous!). The income section gives a simple total. I tried to include interest on a credit balance automatically, but kept getting "circular reasoning".The spending section is one of the engine rooms of the sheet and is at the bottom because it is easy to get to there with Psi-Ctrl-cursor down. It works differently in January. Except in January it uses the payments of Visa, Barclaycard and Marks fixed last month but actually paid this month. In January it uses the amounts at the top of column B brought from the previous year. To this it adds the total of the cheques section and the main fixed monthly non-cash payments like standing orders. It also (pretty successfully) divines the banks interest charges using the month's total balance and the reference figure in column A. Note that the reference cells in columns A-B are normally on the same line as the cells which use them. Only the interest rates and last year balances are not. Hints and tips If the balances seem wrong, start finding out why. This sheet is pretty stable now, but I have sometimes had probs - usually caused by indvertantly overwriting a cell, which is a bit too easy to do. I use the Width command "0" to hide all the columns of completed months; so in December the width of A:X is "0". Since the sheet does not support macros I use a KMAC macro to open up test columns to width 20 and figures to width 8 when I want to see an old month. I usually set a destination cell in range so that Psi-J(ump) takes me to the current month's Visa. The only monthly figures brought from the previous month and the main balance, the Barclaycard balance in its own section, and the Visa and Marks figures in the Spending section. Once you have "locked" these cells by replacing the formulae with real figures, the months to come are stable. Reconcilliation with bank sheets is easy. If it doesn't match find out why and amend it til it does. Items not incuded on bank statements may need moving forward a month, easy with copy-delete. If you ever find you can't close the sheet, don't panic. Press the system button and quit other applictions (NOT sheet!) and delete other files or copy them to other drives to make space. The sheet effectively needs twice its size to work - up to 120K. If your SSD wont cope, then use "save as" to save to internal drive, then copy to the SSD with an overwrite. Titles are ON, and grid labels are OFF. This is how the months stay at the top. I use the > at the begining of entry lines because i like to start with the date (eg. >15 Cix or >16 234 papers where 234 is the cheque number). Since the sheet would otherwise think the date was a figure, I find the > the handiest acceptable character. For the future: I would love to be able to include a code in spending entries to that the sheet would extract all such entries and reassemble them by type of spending in another sheet. I gather this is database work; certainly it is beyond me at the moment. History: 18 Dec 1994 - First version of NewSheet 07 Jan 1995 - Sheet101 corrects 2 errors in original Newsheet which happened while adapting it from my real sheet. CELL D112 and it's monthly repeats F112, H112 etc, changed to =SUM(D134:D113) and NOT =SUM(D134:D114). The original failed to included the sum of the "Cheques" section in the "Spending" section and thus underestimates the year's overdraft by three thousand pounds! Sorry about that. Make the change by altering D112 and then copying it to F112 etc. CELL D119, which takes the initial month's Barclaycard minimum payment, should be =B8 and NOT =B7, otherwise you get the figure owed and not the figure to pay.