Forum Discussion
The Perfect Budget Sheet
I truly appreciate this. You've given me ideas of entries I overlooked (like tracking specific subscriptions). Also, I also pull data from my financial institutions, but your wording leads me to believe that you download AND import the information into your workbook (whereas I do manual copy). How do you do that?
Virtually every financial institution (banks, credit cards, brokerages) makes it possible to download monthly statements or reports of activity. I do download those. The difficult part of this--not really "hard difficult" but rather "time consuming difficult"--is that they all have their own idiosyncratic layouts. So I do spend a minute or two (at most)--deleting a column or two, or perhaps converting text to numbers--in order to get the columns I want. But then, yes, there's a manual "Copy" and "Paste" of that monthly data into the core transactional database of my workbook.
Now that you've asked, I'm wondering if I could instead develop a way to actually import, using FILTER, to get only the data I want from each monthly download, and then just copy and paste special to save as values. OR perhaps Power Query. But no, if you were thinking I had a really sexy way to import, I am going to disappoint you.
One of the more annoying idiosyncratic layouts from a financial institution, by the way, is American Express's so called "Excel format" download. Don't use it. Use their CSV formatted download instead. For some unfathomable reason, they wasted a lot of time making the "Excel format" download look "pretty" with color, fancy heading, multiple row addresses in single cells. It's an abomination if you are expecting it to conform to Excel Table standards. Thankfully, I've not encountered that sort of stupidity on any other of the Excel formatted downloads.