For many of us the best and easiest way to get a handle on how much money we have coming in and going out is to look to our bank for information.

Your bank should provide statements going back for several years, but for this excercise a couple of months detail should be plenty with some extra detail from direct debits thrown in.

After you have logged into your personal banking look for your current account. There you should have the option to download recent transactions:

Its a good idea to take as many transactions as you can, so choose to show more until you have the full list.

Then download the transactions – usually a CSV (Comma seperated) file will be best for loading into your spredsheet.

Now open the .CSV file in your spredsheet (it should walk you through converting from the CSV format) or upload it to Google Sheets:

Once imported you should see your sheet looking like this:

We want to produce a typical month so trim the excess transactions from the sheet.

Its a good idea now to think about direct debits:

Find where your regular direct debits are managed. Make sure each is included just once in your sheet, if one is missing then add a transaction for it. You can check if the debit is annual or quarterly – if they are then divide the payment amount by 12 for annual payment or by 4 for a quarterly – we want the month equivalent for our sheet.

In this example from HSBC you can see if the payment is monthly or less frequent by clicking on the 3 dots.

Once you have the sheet as you want it then you can find the total income/spend by totalling the value column.

First select a cell where you want the total to go, this can be any empty cell but below the value column may suit best. Then click on the functions button ∑ – shown below for Google Sheets:

And here for Libre Open Office:

Now select the SUM function:

Then either highlight all the cells in the value column:

Or type in the formula manually e.g.

=SUM(C1:C22)

Press return and the total amount will be shown:

Going Forward

Its useful to do this every few months to keep an eye on your finances. Even better would be to try using a budgeting strategy – there are many you might like to look at on our site!