Free Google Sheets expense tracker template (works in Excel too)
A free monthly expense tracker for Google Sheets and Excel: budgets by category, a year overview and a shared-expenses column. No signup, every tab explained.
If you just want to see where your money goes each month, you do not need an app, a subscription, or a course. You need a spreadsheet with a handful of honest formulas. This page gives you one: a free expense tracker template that works in Google Sheets and Excel, with monthly budgets by category, a year overview, and no signup wall in front of the download.
We build HippoSplit, an app for splitting expenses with other people, so we spend a lot of time thinking about where personal spending ends and shared spending begins. This tracker covers the personal half properly, and it has one column most trackers skip: a Shared? flag for the rent, groceries and subscriptions you split with someone else. More on that below.
Download the expense tracker template
Download the template here: expense-tracker-template.xlsx. It is completely free: no email, no locked tabs, no watermark. The file opens in Excel as it is.
Prefer Google Sheets? Open the template in Google Sheets and it will offer to make your own copy straight into your Drive: one click, nothing to convert. The dropdowns, formulas, shading and month picker all carry over, because the template only uses formulas both apps share.
The file ships with a filled-in sample month (July 2026, sixteen expenses) so every number on this page is something you can see and poke at. When you are ready to start, clear the sample rows on the Expenses tab, set your own month, and type your own budgets.
What's inside
| Tab | What it does |
|---|---|
| Monthly view | Pick a year and month, and see income, total spent, what is left over, and spending per category against the budget you set |
| Expenses | The log. One row per expense: date, description, category, amount, payment method, a Shared? flag and a notes column. 300 rows |
| Year overview | Every category by every month in one grid, plus an income row and a left-over row for the whole year |
| How to use | The instructions from this page, inside the file, so they travel with it |
One convention runs through the whole file: you only ever type in the white cells. Shaded cells are calculated for you, and anything that fills itself in is marked that way.
Set it up once
On the Monthly view tab, rename the twelve categories to match your life and type a monthly budget next to each. The sample ships with the usual suspects: rent, utilities, groceries, eating out, transport, subscriptions, health, shopping, entertainment, travel, gifts and other. The category dropdown on the Expenses tab follows whatever you type here, so there is nothing to keep in sync by hand.
Then set the year and the month you want to look at, and type your income for each month in the Income row on the Year overview tab. That is the whole setup. Changing the month later is a single dropdown, and every number on the Monthly view follows it.
Log expenses as they happen
Each expense gets one row on the Expenses tab. Date, description, category and amount are the ones that matter; payment method and notes are optional. The Month column at the end fills itself in from the date, and it is what lets the other tabs slice your spending by month without any fragile date arithmetic.
| Column | What goes in it | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Date | When you spent it | 2026-07-08 |
| Description | What it was | Monthly metro pass |
| Category | Pick from the dropdown; the list is whatever you typed on the Monthly view | Transport |
| Amount | The full amount | 49.00 |
| Payment | Optional: Card, Cash, Bank transfer or Other | Card |
| Shared? | Yes on anything you split with someone else | No |
| Notes / receipt link | Optional: a note, or a link to the receipt photo | (a link) |
| Month | Fills itself in from the date. Leave it be | 202607 |
Reading the monthly view
The top of the Monthly view answers the only question most people actually have: income, spent, left over. Below that, the category table shows what you budgeted, what you spent, what is left and how much of the budget is used, with a status flag per category. Green means money still to spend, red means over. In the sample month, shopping is the red row: 89.99 spent against an 80.00 budget, so the status reads Over and the Left cell shows -9.99.
An expense whose category is not on your list does not vanish. It lands in the Everything else row, so the category table always adds up to the same total as the Expenses tab. If that row is ever more than zero, something needs a category.
The year overview
The Year overview tab is the same data turned sideways: every category down the left, January through December across the top, and a total row at the bottom. Type your income per month and the Left over row fills in, which makes it very hard not to notice a month where spending quietly outgrew income. It is the tab to open in December, or whenever you are deciding whether a budget was realistic or just optimistic.
Splitting the shared rows: where HippoSplit takes over
If you live with a partner or roommates, a chunk of your spending is not really yours: it is the household's, and you happened to pay. Mark those rows Shared? and the Monthly view totals them for you. In the sample month that is 1,298.43 of rent, groceries, internet and subscriptions, which is most of the month's spending. That number is worth knowing.
But a tracker can only record it. It cannot tell you who owes whom, chase anyone, or split a receipt where you bought some things together and some separately. That is a different job, and it is the one HippoSplit does.
In HippoSplit, the group is a chat. Type "lunch 24.50 split with Anna and Ben" and the expense is logged and split. Or post a photo of the receipt straight into the chat, the way you would send a picture to friends, and the AI reads it, logs it and keeps the running balance. The shared rows in your tracker are exactly the expenses that belong there.
More free templates
If your spreadsheet problem is shared rather than personal, we also publish a free expense-splitting spreadsheet template that works out who owes whom, and a travel budget template for group trips that combines a trip budget with per-person splitting and settle-up. All three follow the same white-cells-only convention, so they feel like one family.
FAQs
Is this expense tracker template really free?
Yes. The download is a plain .xlsx file with no signup, no email capture and no locked tabs. We make it because people who track expenses carefully tend to be the same people who eventually need to split them.
How do I get it into Google Sheets?
The quick way: open the Sheets version and click Make a copy when Google asks. If you downloaded the .xlsx instead, upload it to Google Drive, open it, and choose File, then Save as Google Sheets. Either way the dropdowns, formulas, conditional colors and cell shading all survive.
Does it work in Excel?
Yes, with no conversion at all. The file is built as .xlsx, so Excel is its native home; Google Sheets is the equal second home.
Can I change the categories?
Yes, and you should. Rename any of the twelve categories on the Monthly view tab and the Expenses dropdown updates itself. Old rows keep whatever category text they had, so re-pick the new name on rows you want counted under it; anything orphaned shows up in the Everything else row rather than disappearing.
How many expenses can it hold?
300 rows, which is roughly a year of normal logging. When it fills up, save a copy per year. That keeps each file fast and matches the Year overview, which is built around a single year anyway.
Can it split expenses with roommates or a partner?
No, and it does not pretend to. The Shared? column totals what you split, but working out who owes whom needs either our expense-splitting template or, with less typing, HippoSplit itself, where you type the expense into the group chat or post a photo of the receipt and the AI does the rest.