Turn your bank statements into a monthly budget spreadsheet

Budgeting apps want a login to your bank. If you'd rather not hand that over, your bank statements have everything you need. A few months of transactions in a spreadsheet will tell you what you actually spend each month, which is the hard part of any budget.

1. Get a few months into one table

Three to six months gives a fair picture without being a big job. You want one table with a date, a description and an amount (negative for money out) for every transaction. If the statements are separate files, see how to combine several months into one spreadsheet.

Leave out transfers between your own accounts, such as moving money to savings or paying off a card from your checking account. They're not spending, and counting them makes your budget look worse than it is.

2. Give every transaction a category

Keep the categories few and broad, around 10 to 15: housing, groceries, eating out, transport, bills, subscriptions, shopping, health, and so on. A formula can do most of it. How to categorize bank transactions shows how.

3. Add a month column

Next to the date, add a column that turns each date into its month:

=TEXT(A2, "yyyy-mm")

It gives 2026-03 for any date in March 2026, which sorts correctly and groups neatly. It needs real dates in column A, not text.

4. Build the monthly view with a pivot table

Select the table and insert a pivot table: Insert → PivotTable in Excel, or Insert → Pivot table in Google Sheets. Then set it up like this:

• Rows: Category
• Columns: Month
• Values: Sum of Amount

You now have a grid of what each category cost in each month. Add a column averaging the months, and that average is your starting budget for each category.

5. Turn it into a budget

Next to each category's average, write what you'd like to spend instead. Next month, add the new month's transactions to the table, refresh the pivot table, and compare. The useful number isn't any single month. It's which categories keep coming in over.

A few things that throw budgets off

• Annual bills such as insurance or a yearly subscription land in one month. Divide them by 12 and budget that every month.
• Refunds show as money in. Categorize them the same as the purchase they refund so they cancel out.
• Credit card statements list the spending itself. If you also count the card payment from your checking account, you count it twice. Use one or the other.

Getting the transactions out of your statements

If your bank only gives PDF statements, the statement converter turns them into a spreadsheet in your browser, with real dates and amounts, and checks each statement against its closing balance so nothing is missed. Your statements aren't uploaded, and nothing connects to your bank.