3 Genius Google Sheets Tips and Hacks for Busy Moms *

AD | Whether you’re a busy working or stay-at-home mom or dad, money is usually on your mind a lot. Just thinking about the daily expenses, the costs of groceries, and every little request that comes your way from the tiny human army in front of you is enough to make your brain spin. Luckily, help is at hand thanks to the power of Google Sheets. Check out these three genius Google Sheets tips and tricks that can make your life so much easier.

Google Sheets – what are they?

If you’re familiar with Microsoft Excel, you’re going to love Google Sheets. It’s a free spreadsheet system that you can use to track all your income and your outgoings in one place. When you can see the reality of numbers in front of you, it makes it that much simpler to take care of any issues before they become troublesome.

I use Google Sheets in my freelance work and also as a way of tracking my blogging income and expenses. Sometimes we can worry about problems that aren’t even there, and I find Google Sheets can help highlight any doubts too.

Google Sheets Tips and Hacks

Want to learn more about how you can conquer the daily tasks of expenses tracking when you’re a busy mom? Here are three great Google Sheets essentials you’ll be glad to add to your organisational armoury.

Google Sheets Free Templates

Google Sheets offers free templates for any level of spreadsheet user. You can choose monthly templates and create sections and tabs that give you a daily outlook.  Monthly budget templates are available, and Google Sheets has a template gallery where you can choose the template that works best for you.

In Google Sheets, choose a monthly budget template that has two sheets. This allows you to go back and forth between the tabs on the bottom section of the sheet. Here you’ll see pre-set tabs for summary functions, start and end balances, and even a line for savings.

You can also use these budgets to not only track your daily income and expenses, such as groceries and utility bills, but to plan ahead as well. Tabs labelled as Transactions can help you to clearly see what you have, or need, and have coming in.

Create an Automated Budget

An automated budget is a budget within Google Sheets that allows you to track what is happening every day, month, and year. Automated budgets in Google Sheets can be broken down by whatever sections you need. Some automated budgets in Google Sheets will even automatically divide your money into sections.

A common template in Google Sheets allows you to have one sheet for income, one for expenses, and another to summarise all of your data. These are divided into tabs at the bottom of your Google Sheets.

You can also create categories for your budget, such as your emergency fund, food, entertainment, and fuel expenses. Another section can divide your income lines by your pay frequency. This could help you to determine how much you want to update, while keeping an eye on how that matches your expenses and savings. Multiple sheets can be used to separate or merge the different categories of your income and expense lines, sheets, and tabs. It’s entirely up to you.

Highlight Duplicates in Google Sheets

When you’re working with Google Sheets, formulas such as the highlight feature can make you feel like you’re an organisational superhero. You can sum up the cells of your spreadsheets manually, or use formulas to create some magic and provide answers in seconds.

One of those formulas is the function where you can highlight duplicates in Google Sheets. This will allow you to see any lines in your budget that are identical. Sometimes you may want that to be the case, such as with your weekly grocery shop. But on other occasions you might not.

To use this function, go to the Format tab in your Google Sheet, select conditional formatting, and then decide how you want to highlight your Google Sheet. This will be an actual highlight, where in just a second, Google will put the colour of your choice in cells on your spreadsheet to help you to find duplicate answers. How cool is that?

Use Google Sheets at Home

There are hundreds of formulas in Google Sheets you can choose from that can perform simple tasks such as these. When you’re a busy mom (and blogger!) managing multiple things at once every minute of every day, having everything organised in one place can turn a bad day into a good one. So why not give these Google Sheets tips a try at home? Just imagine how good it would feel to balance your income and expenses, and lessen some of those day-to-day stresses, in only a few clicks!

Have you ever tried Google Sheets? How do you track your income and outgoings? Do you think an automated budget tracker would be useful for you too?

* This is a sponsored post.