Monthly Budgeting Spreadsheet question

[DylanAddison]

I'm trying to produce a spreadsheet that will allow me to track my daily expenses and know how much I have left (out of a monthly budget I set) to spend in any given category.

In column A, I log the Category (Food, Entertainment, Gas, etc.). In Column B I log the amount I spent. I also log the date and give a description of the transaction.

What I want to do is have another 3 columns (J, K and L for example) that give the category (column J), what I have budgeted for the month (column K) and what I have left to spend (column L). So if J5 (the category column) is Food and K5 (the amount I budgeted for food for the month) is $300, then L5 would = K5-BxIF(Ax="Food") where x is any row number.

The idea is to get excel to search column A for all the transactions categorized as "Food", then add them all up and subtract the sum from what I've budgeted that month for Food to show what I have left to spend.

I know that excel won't recognize my silly formula above, so is there anyone that can help me figure out the right way to do it? Again, I want to enter and categorize my expenses at the end of each day or week, and then be able to see how much I have left in each spending category based on what I budgeted at the beginning of the month.

I've been trying to use the VLOOKUP function, but it only returns the first item it finds (I don't know how to make it add up all the transactions categorized as Food or Entertainment or whatever).

I hope that's clear. Thanks so much for helping me solve this.

-Dylan

[JBeaucaire]

Hy Dylan. Welcome to the forum.

Mockup your workbook completely including manually entering some of these values you want automated so we can see what you're doing, then click GO ADVANCED and use the paperclip icon to upload the sample book. We'll take a look.