excel budget spread sheet

Here,robert402310 , is a revised version of the spreadsheet I sent earlier. I've done two main things here which I hope are helpful.

1. I've moved the Pivot Table to its own tab (tabs are down at the bottom), away from the database on which it's based. This is generally a good practice for a variety of reasons.
2. I've added a lookup table that translates the category codes into more user friendly budget category labels. It would be easy to do the same (or something similar) with month numbers, turning them into the three letter abbreviations for the names of the months.

(Just an aside: once you get into the Pivot Table menu, you'll see my numbers change each time you hit refresh; that's because the random number function gets activated each time. Clearly that wouldn't happen with real numbers, real data)

I just recently created a (much more ambitious) expense tracker for our own personal use and will say that once you get into the Pivot Table, you'll find it amazingly powerful as a tool for summarizing and analyzing basic raw data such as a history of expenses. Just as one example, you can lump expense categories under "Fixed" and "Discretionary" just by adding another column to that lookup table and then the raw database itself. You can add Income categories as well. And then the pivot table will group and subgroup....

A personal aside: I cut my spreadsheet eyeteeth on Lotus (back in the 1980s) as did you. Good to meet another old-timer. Did you also use Quattro in some of the intervening years? Anyway, Excel has built on those foundations and added features on a regular basis. I hope you'll grow in your use and mastery.