Boy, this is a hard one for me! FORMULA SOS

britt635 I would strongly recommend you to re-think the whole process. You are trying to capture transactional information is a reporting style. That's not going to be easy to maintain.

In the attached file I added Sheet1 where I added a small part of the FinEd budget and some Actual expense rows in a structured Excel table. Everything in one table!!

Then, I built a pivot table on that table to produce a very basic Actual vs. Budget report. Keep adding rows to the table and refresh the pivot table and all will be updated almost instantly.

I didn't go as far as to putting in all data validation options, but you can do that yourself. Bear in mind, though, that it's not wise to hard code all the options into the DV list. Better to create, for instance, a list of employees somewhere and point the DV list to that range of cells. Much easier to maintain if people need to be added.

Now, this is a very simple example. You mentioned that you also simplified your data example. So, it's probably not going to work for you without adjustments, but I hope you get an idea of what's possible, provided you capture data (budget and actual) in the correct way from the start.

If you really want to go a bit more sophisticated, you could have one table for the budget and one for the actual and "connect" them via relationships in a Data Model.