How To Use Google Forms As An Expense Tracker

The mobile version is especially handy

An expense tracker is vital if you’re budgeting or you need to know where your money is going. Google Forms is a free form builder that works great as an expense tracker.

Google Forms is heavily customizable, so while it can also be used as a survey, RSVP tool, contact form, product signup sheet, or any other question/answer form, you can make it into a custom expense tracker by choosing expense-related questions.

A Google Forms expense tracker can keep tabs on anything you want regarding a transaction, and since it works great from a phone, you’ll have it with you wherever you go.

You can stop saving receipts or trying to decipher a charge on your credit card; just pull up your expense tracker right after you spend money to record all the important details and submit it to a spreadsheet you can review later.

Tip: See our list of thebest budgeting and expense tracking appsfor some other ways to track expenses. They’re not as customizable as Google Forms but they do have their own benefits.

Decide What To Track

The idea of an expense tracker is to keep tabs on what you’re spending your money on, so there are a few basic details that the form needs to include. But depending on what you’re wanting to track, you might need some extra fields in the form.

Here are some examples of what you might want to track:

When deciding what to include in a Google Forms expense tracker, keep in mind that you want the fields to be as broad as possible so that they can apply to anything you’re purchasing. You don’t necessarily need a field that asks what kind of food you’re buying, for example, unless this is solely a food expense tracker; you might want to also use this for recording rent payment and phone bills.

On that note, you can make any of the fields in your expense tracker form required or not required. So, if you do want a really specific field for something, just make it not required so that you don’t have to use it for every transaction.

Build The Google Forms Expense Tracker

This is a sample expense tracker, so yours, by no means, needs to look exactly like this one. We’re using broad questions with even broader answer options to show how this works. You’ll learn that editing the form is extremely easy, so you shouldn’t have any problem customizing it for yourself.

This isn’t necessary, but your form can also include images, headings, and a unique color scheme. A colorful form might make tracking expenses fun, if that’s at all possible! The paint icon at the top of the page is where you go for those changes.

Set Up Calculations

Every entry from your form is gathered in a nicely formatted spreadsheet at Google Sheets. SelectRESPONSESfrom the top of your form and then click the spreadsheet icon to rename the spreadsheet (if you want).

After the spreadsheet opens, create a new tab at the bottom and name it something likeCalculations.

From there, you can do anything that Google Sheets supports: add up all your expenses for a given time period, create graphs for a visual understanding of your expenses, see who’s spending the most money, identify which stores are costing you the most, etc.

Using those types of formulas in Google Sheets is out of the scope of this article, but let’s look at something really simple like adding up all the expenses for each person so that we can really see who’s spending the most. You can always adapt the formula to total how much you’re spending at each store.

The easiest way to total all the expenses regardless of the person who did the transaction, is to run thesumformula, like this:

=sum(‘Form Responses 1’!B:B)

This calculation works for our example because the price column from the form responses is in column B.

Here’s a Google Sheets formula that shows a much more detailed look at how much each person is spending:

=sumif(‘Form Responses 1′!G:G,”Jeff”,’Form Responses 1’!B:B)

The way this works is by enteringsumifand then choosing the column that contains the names (Gin our example). The next part is identifying the name,Jeff. Finally, select the column heading with the prices so that when the other column matches the name we’re after, it will add just those prices.

Look through Google’slist of Google Sheets functionsfor some other ways to can interpret the data from your form. Another way to see your expenses is with a chart or graph;Google has a tutorialon doing that.

Founder of Help Desk Geek and managing editor. He began blogging in 2007 and quit his job in 2010 to blog full-time. He has over 15 years of industry experience in IT and holds several technical certifications.Read Aseem’s Full Bio

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