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2 | The Travel Budget and Expense Tracker | ||||
3 | THIS IS A READ-ONLY TEMPLATE. Please make a copy for your own use. | ||||
4 | How to Use this Template | ||||
5 | 1 | Import your data: On the sheet titled "Expenses", this is where you enter your expenses. Most banks and credit cards will let you export your transactions as a CSV. Download this file periodically and paste it into the expenses sheet. This will make entering data a lot faster. You can also use apps to track your cash spending. Trailwallet is a decent app that lets you download your data as a CSV file as well for seamless importing | |||
6 | 2 | Date, Tag and Categorize: Once you import and add your expenses to the list make sure you add a transaction date, month, country and category. This will be used by the pivot table to categorize each line item | |||
7 | 3 | You can adjust the top budget section marked in grey to set your monthly budget for each category | |||
8 | 4 | Categorize and Lable Everything! The pivot table uses each label to sum and categorize your data. | |||
9 | 5 | Categories and what they're for: | Trans Date: This is the date that the transation occurred | Month: Set the month that the transaction occurred. Make sure to preserve the formating of "Month-Year" (January-17) so that the expense is collected in the same month on the pivot table. | Country: Set the country category so that the Country pivot table will be able to sort your data by country |
10 | Description: Add a description or title of what the expense was "Dinner with Nancy" | Home Currency: Specify your home currency of the actual amount you were charged after exchange rates and fees. ($ ¢ £ ¥ € etc) | Foreign Currency: If paying by cash it helps to record the original amount paid in the local currency. The app trailwallet for example will autoconvert the amount into your home currenty but keep both amounts in your CSV file. | Symbol: The foreign curreny's symbol | |
11 | Category: Set the expense category so that your pivot table will categorize each expense properly. Make sure you use the exact same spellling and name to avoid duplicate categories with no spaces at the end. | Annual/Monthly: You can choose to separate expenses by month or annual expense. For example the backpack or trip insurance you bought to use for your trip will be used over multiple months and countries but the beers you bought at the bar are a monthly expense. | Notes: A free space to help keep extra notes. |