Personal Project: Built a Personal Finance Dashboard on Excel
So I've been slowly turning my finance spreadsheet into something that does everything for me, and I think I might have gone overboard, but it's decent i guess..
Basic idea: I dump my bank statements into a tab, and pretty much everything after that happens on its own.
- Cleans up and merges all the raw data automatically
- I sort new transactions into categories myself, only takes a couple minutes a month
- Feeds into a data model that drives all the charts
- Behind that there's a full model tracking my income, spending, savings, and investments month by month
The dashboard itself just shows me the important stuff, income, spending, savings rate, net worth, plus a couple charts. But the bit I actually like most is that it writes little summaries on its own, like "car was your biggest expense this month, up 18% from last month," so it is easier to make sense of it all.
It also checks its own numbers and flags anything that doesn't add up, which sounds minor but has saved me a couple times when something got miscategorized and threw a number way off.
Screenshots below, happy to answer questions if anyone's curious how any of it works.