Florian Strauffield notes

Expense Sorted & F-You Money Sheet V2

I rebuilt Expense Sorted over a weekend so the categorisation runs from any Google Sheet, and updated the F-You Money sheet with savings and runway stats.

It's been a long time since I released version 1

I built the tool for myself and used it every month, but the setup was quite sketchy. It needed a database, an app, Replicate for the expense categorisation, and Google Sheets.

As this always goes, you keep using it until the pain is too high, at which point, ideas start forming about how to improve it. Ultimately, the day comes, and you rebuild the whole thing on a weekend. That's what I've done.

I have returned to the initial idea of running all of the categorisation out of Google Sheets. For that, I have turned the categorisation into a simple backend service that is called from Google Sheets for both the training and the categorisation.

Google Sheet “f-you-money-financial-overview” listing bank transactions with category columns

Sheet Updates

On top of that, the sheet has been updated with some nice insights on savings. Here are the most important parts:

Expense Details now contains ALL your expenses and is not split into years:

Same Google Sheet with colour-coded categories and tabs such as Expenses vs. Saving and Savings along the bottom

Monthly expenses are now also a forever-list and not split into years, adding some nice state on savings:

Monthly Expenses tab with income, tax, net savings and savings rate for each month

A new Savings tab includes a quarterly report of your accounts and savings:

Savings tab with quarterly balances per account and net asset value

All of that allows for some interesting stats, including:

  • Monthly average spend

  • Monthly average income

  • Years Runway

Expenses vs. Saving tab with summary tables and a chart of expenses against savings rate

The year's runway is an interesting topic, and I will explore it further in future pieces, but I think people are not aware of this statistic.

I've first described it in Fuck You Money and the initial sheet had it, but this gives it more attention.

Simplify!

I feel like Elon simplifying the raptor engine:

Three SpaceX Raptor rocket engines labelled Raptor 1, Raptor 2 and Raptor 3 side by side

It's probably not as cool, but I've been able to significantly reduce the steps, apps involved, and interactions between them. Now, it all just works from Google Sheets and it does so from any Google Sheet.

Sequence diagram of training and categorising between the Google Sheet extension, a Python backend API and the Replicate model

Originally published at https://blog.learnedlate.com/p/expense-sorted-and-f-you-money-sheet.