A budget planner worksheet give you a documented and therefore practical control of your household budget. Generally the simpler the worksheet the more effective it is. You can very easily create one for yourself using a notebook, accounts ledger or computer spreadsheet. Each one of them would serve the purpose of giving you command over the expenses. Nowadays there are several budgeting systems available in the market. However most of them are quite complicated as they include features like flow charts, pie charts and other complex methods of analysis. It is to be noted that you merely need a way to record your house budget and not the transactions of a commercial establishment. So it should be kept in mind that the budget planner worksheet should be kept as simple as possible.
The steps to create a good budget planner worksheet are as follows:-
The first step is to create 3 bank accounts namely everyday account, expense account and the savings account. You need to make sure that your income goes to the everyday account and that is easily available to you. The next step is to understand your budget cycle i.e do you receive your income every week, every fortnight or is it monthly. Subsequently you should write down your total household income for every income cycle. Under the everyday account heading you need to mention all the expenses that you straight away give out of your pay. Examples of this category include fuel, groceries, lunch money etc. The expense section constitues of all those things which are you billed for like phone, power, insurance etc.
You can create a rough annual figure for all the bills you need to pay by referring to your previous bills. Then out of your total income you need to subtract the total of all the expenses that you straight away pay from your income. Next you should subtract the money you have calculated for the bills. Now whatever is left in the budget planner worksheet is your play money which you can utilize the way you want.