Live: Tracking Your Personal Finances With Numbers

Hi, everyone.

This is Gary with MacMost.com.

And on this live episode, I'm going to show you how to use Numbers on your Mac to track your personal expenses.

So Numbers is, of course, the spreadsheet app that comes with your Mac.

If for some reason it's not on your Mac, you can go to the App Store and get it for free.

And it's a spreadsheet app like Excel on Windows.

And you can use it for calculations, for keeping track of things as a little mini database.

And you don't need to be an expert at spreadsheets, at math, at doing things like creating formulas to use numbers.

You can use it for something simple, like just keeping track of your expenses and just have that data in there.

And I'll show you how to do that, how to keep a record of things, and also then how to analyze that data without using any formulas, just some simple functions inside of numbers that can help you with your personal finances.

So let's switch over to the screen here and I've run the numbers app here.

So you could see the icon there in my doc.

And when you first run it, you get to choose a template.

If you don't, you can go to file and then there's a way to create a new document and choose a template.

and I'm going to choose the blank template.

Now there is a personal budget template here that you could use if you want.

There's also simple budget, personal savings, all sorts of things here under personal finance that you could check out.

But what I want to show you is just starting from scratch.

So I'm going to use the template called blank and I'm going to double click on that and open up a blank document here.

And it gives you a sample table like this.

And we're going to just start from this, start from scratch.

So this table is like a little mini spreadsheet.

If you've come from Excel, you may be used to the fact that the entire sheet is taken out with cells.

In numbers, it doesn't work like that.

You have these tables inside of a sheet.

A sheet is kind of this area that you could create.

tables, graphics, you can have multiple tables.

You could see like that.

And I'm going to just use this one default table that was created at the template here and just start with that.

So what we're going to do is create a journal to track our expenses.

And then once we have that data, we could do things with it.

So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to create some columns.

So I've got these columns here that will have different rows in it to create, to whole data.

You'll see what I mean here in a minute.

So I want to go ahead and first thing I want to do is I've got header rows and header columns.

This is a row going across and it's a header row here.

So we can use it to label what the column contains.

Likewise, the header column here can be used for identifiers.

Like imagine this is like a little database and each item here has an identifier.

So say if you're a teacher keeping track of students in your class or whatever, each one would have the student's name here, and then you can have different information about the student.

We're not going to be using this column because we don't have unique identifiers for things like expenses.

I mean, maybe you do, right? You get a receipt from a restaurant and it's got like a receipt number, but that doesn't really match up with, say, the bill you pay to pay your electricity or your rent or whatever.

We don't really have unique identifiers.

We're going to with a date column, which makes more sense, but dates aren't unique.

You might pay several bills or have several expenses in a day.

So we're going to get rid of this column here.

It's going to click on where it says A here, the header for the column, and I'm going to then select delete column to get rid of the A column.

And now we have no header column, but we have a header row and header row is where we're going to actually name each column.

So like this first column here, just double click in it and then type.

And this is going to be the date, the date for each expense.

I'm going to go to the next cell by using the tab key.

And this will be a description of the expense.

We're kind of going with the kind of a natural flow of how you would enter data here.

You would have an expense and you would say, okay, it's on this date and this is what the expense was.

And then the next one will be for the amount, how much the expense was for.

Now, one of the things we want to do is we want to be able to group expenses together, like to see how much we spend on food or housing, that kind of thing.

And to do that, we need to categorize every expense.

So we'll create category.

Here is the next one.

And I want to have one more column here.

I'm not actually even going to use it in this tutorial, but I think it's important to have something like notes because from time to time, you're going to have a little notes and extra information you want to include with an expense.

So you want to have a place to put that.

So we'll have notes there.

And then we don't need this last column here, so we'll delete this column.

So now we've got five columns here.

The next thing we want to do is kind of size them.

We don't need so much space for the date, so I can drag the line here between A and B to the left a bit.

Description, we probably want more space, so you want to drag the line here to the right.

And notes, we probably want more space too, like that.

And we can continue to adjust this later on as we see how we use each of these.

we want to name this table we're going to name this expenses like that also we want to name the sheet so numbers documents get multiple sheets in them so this sheet we could put other tables to the right or below this or above it if we wanted to but it'd be nice just to have this table by itself on its own sheet that we could switch to using these little tabs here so we're going to add more sheets for now we're going to name the sheet so we know it's not just sheet one it's actually the expenses journal.

And I'm using the term journal here because that's what this is.

This is going to be our database of our expenses.

We're not going to do any calculations here.

We're just going to use this to record data.

And we're going to then look at that data, analyze that data on other sheets.

So this is just the journal here.

And then we can enter in information.

So let's say one slash four, January 4th.

We went to a restaurant and it was $80.56.

The category was, we could say food, and there's no notes for that.

And I could just tap to go to each one of these.

I'll go to the next one here and say, the next day we paid a rent and rent was $1,500.

We'll call that housing.

And then maybe say on that same day, we went grocery shopping and we'll say, you know, we spent $140.52 and this was more food and so on.

And the idea is you enter these in, you know, in groups probably, you know, every Saturday morning or maybe do it daily or however you want to do it.

You just add in your expenses here.

Maybe when you log on and look at your credit card statement, look at your debit card statement, you kind of figure this all out.

And you can just keep going here.

Now, there's a bunch of different things here that we want to pay careful attention to.

One of those is the categories.

So it's important when we think about these categories, we don't want to have an individual category for every kind of thing.

for instance, restaurant and groceries, do we want to group those together both as food expenses or do we want to have them separate as say meals and entertainment or, you know, restaurants or whatever, uh, and groceries as something else like home, uh, goods, or maybe, you know, this is food or groceries.

It depends how you want to group them together, right? If you want to group all your food expenses, restaurant and groceries together, give them the same category.

If for instance, housing, you want to put, say, your energy bills under housing, you can, or you can put those under utilities.

Too many categories, and then you don't get any useful information because everything's broken up into too many small categories.

Too few categories, and it's hard to see what you're spending your money on.

So, you know, between five and 10 is probably a good number.

But it's important to realize with all of this, you could adjust it later.

Too often people get hung up at the beginning and have trouble starting because they can't decide on the categories.

you know, you could just make it up as you go along.

And a few months in, you could go through each of these entries, maybe a few months in, you have a hundred of these and you go through and you kind of refine your categories, you know, copy and paste and get rid of some categories, combine them with others, that kind of thing.

So don't get too long up on things like this at the beginning.

So the other thing we want to pay attention to here is formatting.

So notice here, all these dates are formatted fine, but they don't include the year.

So let's say I created another one here, 1, 6, and I said 26 to include the year.

And then I do 1, 7, 20, 26.

And that's another way of doing it.

And then I say, oh, because I'm not thinking about it, I say January 8th.

Notice these are all different formats.

Be nice to have these the same format.

I'm going to click on the A here to select the entire column, go to the format sidebar.

And in the format sidebar, I'm going to go to cell and then choose a data format.

Right now it's set to automatic.

So whatever you type, it's going to kind of guess the format, which is how we ended up with this mess here.

Instead, we're going to go here and choose date and time.

And then we get to set for the date, choose, let's say this format here.

And notice how it changes it all to fit that.

Time, none, because we don't use time for, you know, this kind of thing.

So we've got now the uniformity.

And if I were to type something like Gen 9, it converts it to that because we've set the format for all of these cells up.

And it recognizes that.

Same thing here for the amount.

If I select this, it's just automatic.

And it's only this because of the way I typed things, a dollar sign first.

But if I were to type, say, 100 here, and let's say, you know, 5623 here, it's a different format.

If I select all this and say, this is going to be currency, decimals too, which is probably good for dollars and cents, a thousand separators useful.

So I could see the comma there.

You more easily see this as a big expense here.

And I could do accounting style, which moves the dollar sign over to the left, if you like that.

So now the same thing here, if I were to type in 60 here, it uses the format for the cells here.

So that's a good way to get us started.

And the idea here is that we've got some sample data here.

We've got it formatted the way we want.

We've got categories kind of started.

And we can go back and change this anytime we want.

And we could create this expenses table here.

Let's create another sheet.

I'm going to click this plus button.

And I've got another sheet here.

And I'll call this the income journal.

And you don't need to do both.

For a lot of people, doing just an expenses journal, it's all you need, right? Maybe your income journal is just a regular paycheck that you get twice a month, and you don't really need to keep track of that.

And expenses is really what you want to keep track of.

That's perfectly fine.

So you don't need an income journal, but I want to include it here as just an example.

So this could be called income.

And maybe the same thing here.

We don't have a specific identifier here.

So we'll delete this column and we'll say this is the date.

This is the source of the income.

This is the amount.

And we could do category if we want.

May not be necessary here.

And we could add another one.

I'm going to click this little button right here to add another column.

And now we've got notes.

And we could do something like a paycheck and going all the way across.

Do the same thing with formatting the date and the amount and all of that.

And so you can have an expenses and income.

And both of these are journals.

They're both going to record all your data.

One important thing is to not divide these up.

This is a big mistake that people make.

And it seems kind of natural if you've never done this before to say, you know what, I'm going to make this.

This is going to be my January 2026 expenses.

I'm going to record them all here, have all my expenses for January and a nice neat table.

And when I get to February, I'm going to create a new sheet and a new table.

This is a big mistake.

You know, you get three years into this and you've got tons of sheets, tons of tables, and then you have trouble analyzing your data, trouble making charts that go across the different months to track things, trouble finding out like how much more or less you've spent, you're spending on housing or food or whatever, because you've broken things up arbitrarily by month or by year.

You know, you may say, well, I won't do by month.

I'm going to do by year.

Now, don't break them up at all.

This is a database.

Just keep the data flowing in to this.

We'll see how we can easily divide months up later on.

But you want to keep everything together.

Don't break it up per month, per year, or anything like that.

Keep like data together in one database.

These are just your journals.

We're going to look at how to analyze that data sometimes per month, times per year in a few minutes here.

So yeah, have all of these like this.

And what I'm going to do here is I, instead of just you watching me enter in tons of sample data, I'm going to open up an example that I prepared this one.

So I've got expenses journal here and I've got years worth of sample data in the expenses journal, but it looks just like what we did before and an income journal as well that shows you know there's some paychecks and there's some bonuses and there's some gig work right um in here so you've got a variety of things so now we could start to work with this uh and do some calculations use this information to help uh you know i'm supposed to be more productive help make realize better help us manage our expenses so before i get to that i want to do point out that uh macmost is brought to you thanks to a great group of patreon supporters so if you notice you go to macmost.com or you get the weekly macmost newsletter that there are no ads in that um the reason there are no ads is because macmost gets most of its income from the patreon supporters so you can go over here to macmost.com patreon You could read about it.

And there's more than 2,000 people now that support MacMost through Patreon.

I'm so grateful for them.

And they get some extra content per week.

I put a couple more videos up just for them.

And there's also iHealthcourses.

And there are course discounts that you get at the different levels of supporting MacMost through Patreon.

So I'm going to give a big thank you to all my Patreon supporters for that.

And I just want to mention that, you know, if you're thinking, well, but there are ads here at YouTube, this video will actually be available at MacMost.com shortly after I finish the live stream.

And I actually clean up the audio a bit and trim the little beginning and end, you know, to make it a little better.

And I post it there and you could view it there without ads as well.

So let's get to actually doing stuff with the data.

We've got all this data here.

Now, how could we actually do something with it? Well, there are a ton of different ways, all without using formulas.

So for instance, like let's go through here and say you're looking at this and you're like, you know, oh boy, something about September, 2024.

I've got all these dates here for September, 24.

Let me select here and I'm going to shift click to select this range of amounts.

This is all for September.

You could see the little rows here are highlighted.

I've got all September.

I've got the amounts there.

And right away, without doing anything, we've got some information at the bottom because it gives us a sum here.

There's a sum of everything we've selected.

And you also get an average, probably not very useful here, but you get a min and max that could be useful and a count as well.

So you, you know, get some information just by selecting things like, okay, so that's that September, 2477.

Let's go to this September here.

and let's select this and 2550.

So, you know, you can compare.

So right away, I'm just showing you just simple ways that you could use this data without having to create anything or do much.

You could also do some filtering here.

So we've got these categories and you may think, oh, you know what, let's sort by the category.

So I see all like the food items together.

But actually what's better here is filtering.

If you click on the little menu for the column here, you could do quick filter or show filter options.

So quick filter brings up these check boxes here and this shows all my categories.

It looks through the column and it gets all the categories and allows me to quickly filter like that.

So I could just see housing.

So that's kind of useful to do that.

And you can also filter, not with the quick filters, but you can just do show filter options, which takes you to organize filter.

So I could have done that through the sidebar.

I could add a filter here for, say, category.

And I could say the text is, and then type, you know, food.

And then it will filter like that.

So that's one way to do it.

And the cool thing about this is you could turn off filters and then turn them on again.

So that's another way to handle it.

One caution about filters, when you've got filters on, don't try to add or modify data.

I would turn it off and then work with the data, turn it on to view the data, right? You also have something called categories.

If I go to organize categories here, you can add a category and you pick one of these.

Let's pick the category category.

And what it's going to do is it's going to put all the food together because I said categorize by this column.

And then if I scroll down, there's all the transportation and there's all the housing and all of that.

It groups them together and I can expand and hide each one of these.

In fact, option click will hide them all.

And then I could just look at housing like that.

That's useful.

Matter of fact, notice here, you have this kind of subheader row here.

If I click on that and then click this little gear there, I could say, give me the sums.

So actually, you don't want the sums of the category.

You want the sums of the amounts.

So give me the sum.

And it'll give me the total spent on all housing, total spent on transportation, total spent on food.

So you could see that.

But you could also say, give me the, I don't know, the average, the amount, the average amount there.

Probably not very useful in this, but you get the idea.

So you could do that.

We could go and say, show category groups, not for category, but for date.

And then it groups it by year month.

So if you do by month, that would be weird.

It doesn't even offer that because that would be like all your Januaries together.

But year month means January 2024, as opposed to later in this list is January 2025.

And then it's grouping.

And then you've got the sum here.

So you can see the sum for January 24.

I'm going to option click on the little arrow there.

I could see the sum for each month.

So using categories allows you to do stuff.

I could even say, you know what? Year.

Let's do year.

There's 2024, 2025, and so far in 2026.

so i can calculate all that and i can expand it you can even have multiple categories so i could do uh date and category so now if i expand 2024 20 inside 2024 is all of these subcategories and i could look here for all the miscellaneous stuff so categorizing is really useful but that's probably not where you're going to want to go with this um what you're probably going to want to do what's easiest to see and get results from is using pivot tables.

And pivot tables sound kind of scary, right? It's like, oh, wait, that's advanced spreadsheet stuff.

It's actually not.

Notice, I still haven't used any formulas, and I'm not going to.

And pivot tables aren't going to use formulas either.

They're pretty simple.

So the thing to do to create a pivot table is first, select something inside of a table, just to show you've got the table selected, right? If I click Outside of this, I have no table selected and I can't even do a pivot table.

I need to select a table and then pivot table, the button here becomes active.

And it's going to use a table, doesn't care that I've got this cell selected, just that table to create a pivot table.

So using our expenses table, I'm going to click pivot table and it's going to create another sheet.

Notice here, expenses journal, income journal still there.

it creates expenses pivot and it gets the name expenses because that was the table name right table name was expenses so now expenses pivot is the sheet name and this pivot table there's nothing here in this pivot table yet it's selected you could see you know as opposed to clicking away now clicking it and it says to add value to this table view pivot option so i've got organize pivot options on the right.

It shows us these four columns here.

Why only four? Because notes is empty.

We didn't put anything in notes, so it knows not to use that.

So we're going to go and say, what do we want to use in this pivot table? We want to see how our expenses changed over months.

So we're going to do date.

I'm going to click on date here, and then suddenly it's going to give us dates here on the left, and it's going to break it up by year.

That's okay, because we don't want year, we want month.

But if we look here under the right column, we see rows is now year, added that in.

And there's a little I button next to it.

I click the I button.

I could say group by, not by year, but by year dash month.

If I did month, again, it would group all the January expenses together, no matter which year they were in.

It's not very useful.

But year month gives us January 2024, February 2024, et cetera.

That's great, but we haven't told it what data we want to see.

We've only said we want to see things by date, but we haven't said what.

So we're going to go and say what we want is amount.

Select amount here, and it's instantly going to go and give us for every month a sum.

It's going to assume sum.

We could click the I button here and we could say, oh, we don't want some, we want average, or you want the count or the maximum.

But of course, we do want some.

So we'll leave it at that.

And we now have the sum for every month.

See how that works.

So no formulas.

And we have a nice summary here, even though this is a very long table with tons of data and we're going to keep adding to it.

The pivot table summarizes it per month.

So this may be the whole point of doing this.

We want to keep our expenses down under a certain amount.

Now we can kind of track that and see what's going on.

And if we wanted to change that to year, we can click here and say, not year month, let's do year, right? And oh, not year, let's do year quarter for some reason.

So you have all these different options here for that.

You could also do filters.

So organize, you have your pivot options and with that table still selected, you can go filter here, add a filter, and we can filter by category.

And then it's going to show us all these categories.

And let's say we only want to know housing per month.

So you could see by filtering here using this quick filter, we now have this expenses pivot is giving us only housing.

And this is really useful because, well, it's useful just on that.

But if say we want to look at basics, right? We want to or we want to look at things that aren't basics.

Like what do we spend on clothing, recreation, and miscellaneous? Maybe throw communications in there and just see how we're doing here when we take food, health, housing, and transportation out of it.

So yeah, you could do a lot here to analyze your data using filters and you could turn the filters off without actually getting rid of them.

I don't have to use the trash button here to delete this filter.

I could just turn the filter off so that later on I can turn it on again.

So that's how you can use the pivot table here.

But you can also go to the next step and use this for charts.

So I've got this information here.

It'd be great to chart this.

If I was here and I wanted to chart per month how much I was spending, how would I even do that? I'd have to start like another table, do some calculations, how much for January, how much for all that but you don't need to bother with that because you've done a quick pivot table here to get you your monthly expenses i could select this pivot table and then click chart and select the type of chart let's just do a quick bar chart like this and it gives us now the months along the bottom and the amounts going up and we could see here how much we've spent we'll delete that Instead, let's select this again and go chart and just do a line graph.

So that makes more sense there, right? And, you know, let's say, oh, you know, we only got a partial month here.

So let's go here and format or sorry, organize filter.

Let's get rid of this filter, date filter.

The date is, let's see, you know, let's see, before, and let's say 1-1-2026, like that.

And then this should filter out, let's see, date is before, or not days ago, let's see, date is before, I'm not sure why it's not doing that.

It should filter out for this.

Oh, it's not letting us turn.

Oh, there it goes.

Okay.

So date is before.

oh it's saying days ago so it's doing that so we say date uh let's see before the date at every we went before the date is before the date 1 1 26 and now we could see so that was the key date not date is before and that's like number of days ago but date is before the date and we could see it took away that january there so now we've got kind of something that makes more sense.

A cool thing you could do here is select the chart, go to format here, go to series, and say we want a trend line and do a linear trend line like that.

It gives us this trend line and we could see the trend line is trending up.

So we're spending more.

It's just a useful thing you can do with this.

Let's try something else with charts here.

Let's go to this pivot table and instead, well, let's actually just keep this pivot table, expenses per month, right? And let's make sure we turned off that filter.

Let's not have that filter anymore.

So January's back in play.

And now we expenses per month, let's go back to this.

And let's say, let's create another pivot table And we'll call this one expenses per category.

And let's say we want to say, instead of date, category.

So all the categories here on the left and then amount is here on the right.

And we can see the sum, we can adjust that there.

And then we could see how much we spend on each of these.

We'd add a filter and say, let's only do it for a certain year.

So let's say date and date is, we could say in the range 1-1-2025 to 12-31-2025 like that.

So it's only 2025.

And then we could select this, go chart and then create a nice pie chart.

And then the pie chart will show us like where we're spending all our money.

Housing is big.

Food is the next biggest slice.

That kind of thing.

And we can keep this around.

Whenever you have a pivot table that you're keeping around, whether the chart or not, remember you select the pivot table, go to pivot options, and you need to use this update button.

So if I update this and add a whole bunch of new stuff, go back over to expenses per month, click the update button to update the pivot table there.

So some really easy ways to do things.

And again, I never used a formula for any of this.

You can keep these around or you could say, oh, I just wanted to do this just to see.

I don't need to have this here all the time.

I could delete this sheet.

I'll keep expenses per month around because that's kind of useful for me to see.

And you could do the same thing with the income journal here.

I can select this pivot table.

Let's say date and then the category here.

Actually, that's adding two things.

So you can date and category.

And I want the amounts here.

So now we could see per year in 2024, 2025, my bonus amounts, all of that.

If you want this to be the opposite, drag date up in rows.

Now you could see 2024 bonus paycheck like that.

and then 2025 bonus gig work paycheck was added to it and you could see the totals here and then the grand total there so uh easy stuff to be able to do again with no formulas and i think um that is uh pretty much the whole idea here is you know no formulas for this be able to uh you know use a spreadsheet without having to get into the math without having to get into the and just be able to create useful things.

You don't have to do everything right away.

If you just want to start your journal now and figure you'll get into the pivot tables later, then that's great.

You could just do that.

I mean, that's how you would do it on paper anyway, right? You would, if you were keeping a paper journal of it, you just keep writing things down and say, I'll get around to using this data later.

Same thing now.

You could just start the expenses journal now, do an income journal later, and then later on say, I'm going to get into pivot tables and try to analyze data.

After all, if you start today, it's going to be a while before the data is useful anyway, right? You're probably going to want to keep track for several months or several years before you can start to analyze it and maybe see trends or come up with some, you know, strategies for handling expenses and income and stuff like that with the data that you've got.

So this is just a really good way to get into spreadsheets and a way that spreadsheets can help you.

another way to get the most from your Mac, but also help your Mac get the most from how you live your life and all of that.

I'll take a look at any questions that people have after I end the live stream and try to answer them here in the comments.

But you can also, if you're viewing this video later, ask questions in the comments here on YouTube and also at MacMost.

So I hope you found this useful.

Thanks for watching.