if statements

wjallen14   Depending on how granular you want to be, I have a retirement planning budget that I've created that just looks at things on an annual basis--projected income is on one sheet; projected/actual expenses on another....assumptions and tables on two more. You could easily modify it to a monthly, I think. It would give you yet another way to visualize in contrast with each month on its own. Let me know if you'd be interested.

Speaking of granularity, though, with regard to your monthly actuals--are you going to be entering final numbers by category, based on outputs from some other source (Quicken, etc)? Or are you planning on entering each check, as well as each credit card or cash transaction directly into your monthly sheet to calculate Actual very precisely, and also give yourself the ability to dig down into detail when there's a variance that you want to explore. It's this latter sort of analysis that people here on this message thread are getting at by suggesting you create a single database--that will give you the ability to produce high level summary reports on a month-by-month basis, but also provide drill down analytical abilities.

wjallen14  To have yet another voice chime in here in support of what you're being told: first, you ask a reasonable question, wondering whether creating one single database (that's what it is) from which you run reports using Pivot Table or some other of the more advanced features of Excel, would be confusing to a novice. And the answer is probably affirmative, until you get accustomed to it. At which point, you'll see the advantage. It does require re-thinking how we conceptualize information around, in this case, your budget.

The way you are talking of doing it takes minimal advantage of Excel--essentially you're using the basic math functions (adding, subtracting, maybe some multiplying (if you add in a COLA adjustment for example))....but otherwise you're just using the sheets of an Excel workbook as if it were a green ledger book, nothing more.

What's being suggested is that you re-think the data and how it can be manipulated, sorted, queried, etc., still to do what you want, but so much more, and so much more efficiently.

Two things that might help:

1. If you still want to stick with your original question and approach, I've attached a simple spreadsheet that gives you a simple formula that increments whatever starting month you want by one month in the next cell....that could work across sheets too.
2. And here's a link to a host of Microsoft Templates for such things as personal budgets. They'll take you a long way toward achieving your objective and might even do it in the way you're conceiving it. https://templates.office.com/en-us/Search/results?query=budget