You probably think that you are good with your finances — you do not splurge on non-essential items, and you always try to stretch the dollar just a little more. Yet, you find yourself struggling towards the end of the month, it feels like it has more than 31 days, and you soon realize that you are living paycheck to paycheck.
You just don’t know where your money disappears. You hold it tight, but it somehow slips through your fingers into oblivion.
Bad, bad situation!
But you can turn it around by maintaining a budget tracker on Notion and updating it religiously - every time you spend a dollar. Getting a raise is another way but that’s not under your control — your Notion account, on the other hand, is.
You could be a student trying to keep a check on their spendings, maybe you share expenses with your roommate and just want to ensure that you both pay your share equally, or you could even be a couple who wants to tighten their budget — this guide is for everyone.
We will create a customizable Notion budget tracker and cover each property of the tracker database in detail, so you know the purpose behind it. While the tracker would be directly useful for an imaginary couple, Jane and John, you can customize it to your needs with some minor changes.
Are you ready for this? Good. Let’s get started.
Here are the eight steps to creating a budget tracker in Notion:
1. Create a new database in the table view
You need to be able to categorize cash flow into categories and subcategories to manage the budget effectively, agnostic to the platform. For example, buying groceries and paying bills are both expenditures. You want to be able to set filters that show you how much you spent on a specific type of expenditure.
This way, you would be able to track your grocery spending every month and budget for it more effectively.
Notion databases support these filters and enable you to create new views unique to each requirement. You will be able to slice and dice data any way you want to generate insights. You, for example, can set a filter to calculate how much more you spent on Uber in February compared to January by creating a new view that displays rows with the “Category” column set to “Uber”.
You will be able to see in one view that you spent $200 on Uber in January and $275 in February. You can then figure out if that expense was avoidable or reducible.
Alright, let’s create a table view database which would contain the monthly budget.
Start by typing “/table” inside a new Notion page and click on the “Table view” option, as demonstrated in the image below.
This will prompt Notion to display an empty database. Click on the “New database” option to create the database from scratch.
2. Add relevant column properties
The built-in Notion template for budget comes with preset columns but it can get quite limiting for most use-cases. You need enough columns with varied property types to capture the essence of each cash flow item.
Every little detail matters. Suppose you record the budget for a whole year and notice that your “Entertainment” expenses spike every weekend. It can be considered normal, but if the same spike happens on random days of the week, you might want to look into it. Having enough properties would make analysis and insight-derivation like in the above scenario easy.
Here’s what the empty database now looks like with all it’s columns and properties in place:
Let’s dig in deeper into each property and evaluate the need for it to be in there.
1. Instrument
The instrument column records the name of the cash flow. It could be the income of the couple, expenditure on gas, etc. While it may sound very similar to “Category”, you can use instruments only as the vehicle of cash flow, it’s not concrete. For example, what John would term as expense on cab, Jane would record it as an expense on Uber.
The property set for this column is “Text”.
We would not use the “Instrument” column much for generating insights because of its transience.
2. Cash flow type
cash flow determines which directions money flows — into your account or out of it. While it’s perfectly fine to track only your expenses in the budget tracker, adding your income allows you to keep all money-related stuff on one page. And that’s what we will do in our version of the budget tracker, we will include income from salary and stock dividends, and also add investment into the tracker, along with the expenses.
The goal is to maintain the complete picture of how money acts, right inside your Notion workspace.
We will record three cash flow types in our example — Income, Investment, and Expenses. You get to select only one of them.
3. Category
The category column is where we record the type of expenditure. Most filters we would apply and new database views we create would be based on this property.
The tracker covers the most common categories but you can add more to customize it to your unique requirements. For instance, you might want to record the wifi, power, and phone bills as separate categories instead of clubbing them under the common umbrella of “Bills” as done in the tracker.
This property for this column is “Select”, meaning you get to choose any one category per transaction. However, if you want to select multiple options for each transaction, change the property to “Multi-select.”
4. Amount
The “Amount” column uses the “Number” property and accepts only dollar values. It records the monetary value of each transaction.
5. Date
The property for this column is set to “Date”, meaning you can only enter the date of transaction. You can change the format if you want. It’s also worth noting that most categories have only one date assigned to them. This, however, may not be the case in most practical scenarios.
For example, you would mostly buy groceries more than once a month. You can easily add more rows to the budget tracker and assign values to each cell in it.
6. Paid by
The “Paid by” column uses the “People” property type. It is useful when there is more than one person impacting the budget. In our example, since John and Jane both record their transactions in the same tracker, they might want to check their individual spendings towards the end of the month.
Having this column property enables filtering and segregating the Notion budget tracker into different table views based on the payee.
7. Other columns
The purpose of adding the “Avoidable/Reducible” column is to inform the tracker owners about excess spending. It is a “Checkbox” property column and it helps users make better spending decisions in the subsequent months.
We also added a “Comments” column which uses the “Text” property type and track minute details that other columns can’t capture.
3. Set up database views for each cash flow type
Alright, now that we have the budget tracker for January, recorded in a Notion page, it’s time to generate insights.
We will start by creating database views for each of the three cash flow types: Income, Investment, Expense.
To do that, click on the “+” icon next to the “Master View”, this will duplicate the main view. Next, click on the “Filter” button as demonstrated in the below image, and filter by “Cash Flow Type.”
In the next view, click on “Income” to include entries that are mapped to the “Income” cash flow type, as displayed in the below image.
In the same way, create views for the “Investment” and “Expenses” property type as well.
Keeping different views will help you analyze your cash flows every year. You will be able to clearly see where your money gets spent, how often your investments pay dividends. It will also tell you how inflation is impacting your savings and when getting a promotion or switching a job becomes indispensable.
4. Calculate total monthly expenses and savings
While it looks like a straight-forward affair, adding monthly expenses, totaling them requires a bit of logic and aligning with your requirements. For example, some might add their investment into expenses while some would not add their dividends to their income.
This means, two sets of Notion budget trackers that look exactly the same, down to the decimal, might display different savings!
Either way, after you finalize what you want to term as an “Expense”, you might invariably want to calculate the total. To do that, you can simply sum the Notion column titled “Amount” within the “Expense” table view, as demonstrated in the below image.
Notion displays the total at the bottom of the “Amount” column, as indicated in the below image.
5. Create a new view for each month
As your “Master View” database grows in size, month-over-month, you would want to work in a smaller dataset because it’s easier to manage. This way, you can also focus only on the budget of the current month and towards the end of the month, you can just leave the view as is, or archive it in a different Notion folder just to keep the main database clean.
Now, just the way we created different views based on the cash flow category, we can create them based on the dates of transaction as well.
Simply, create a new table view and set up a filter for the “Date” column. You can then set the current month as the filter by clicking on the “Month” option in the dropdown, as demonstrated in the image below.
6. Create views based on categories
As we mentioned in the beginning, we are going super granular with our Notion budget tracker.
In this step, we will create a new table view for only the 401(k) investments for John and Jane.
We can create views for other specific expenses or investments as well. For example, the couple would probably buy groceries every week. We can even set up a filter for groceries to see how much they spent. In fact, we can add yet another column where they sub-categorize their grocery purchases into meat, veggies, fruits, spices, milk, etc. We can be as detailed and as comprehensive with the budget as we want.
But for now, let’s stick with the simple example of 401(k)s.
Create a new table view and add a filter for the “401k” option under the “Category” column, as displayed in the below image.
Notion now displays only the entries for 401(k) and the couple can know how much they spend on the instrument.
7. Create database view based on the payer
Let’s continue slicing and dicing data further. John and Jane both contribute to the income and expenses of the household but they might want to know how much load they pull individually. That way, they would be able to distribute expenses better if they notice that one person is pulling more load.
You can do that by creating another tabular view and setting up the filter for the “Paid by” column.
The below image displays the database that is filtered for Jane’s expenses.
8. Set up relations and rollups (optional)
The Notion budget tracker we created works well for most people. However, there might be instances where you want to pull data from one database into another.
For example, John and Jane went on a vacation and created a new tracker to record their expenses. That makes sense because the cash flow category items would be different. Yet, they might want to add a single record in the master view of their monthly budget tracker which records the total amount spent on the vacation.
Notion relations and rollups enable you to access data from one database, process it, and add as a value in a different database. This means, John and Jane can access data from their vacation tracker, add all expenses, and record them as a line item in their master view.
We covered the process of creating a Notion budget tracker - while it looks like a long process, it will take only 5-10 minutes to set it up. While you might need to update the categories once a while, the tracker would be mostly static, you just add items to it and keep creating new views. Overall, it’s quite a simple(and mundane) process. Managing a budget is easy if you add all expenses to your tracker daily — religiously.
