A Financial Notion: My Financial Tracker Build | Step-by Step Notion Tutorial

keeping track of your personal budgeting or your freelance expenses can be very tricky for years i just threw these into one of these and then had a horrific weekend with one of these that's such a bad line enter notion in today's step-by-step tutorial i'll take you through the basics of building your very own version of my finance tracker that will make managing your money less complicated welcome back to the channel if you are new here however i'm simon and on better creating i'm trying to simplify productivity and creative life so you might want before you watch this video to go and take a tour of my full notion financial tracker template that this is based on in my previous video it's linked above and below and then come back here for more you can also download the full template via the link in the description if you'd rather just do that and start using it in this build video i'm going to show you step by step how to build the following video one will build the main system databases and the financial archive view that includes an income database where you can log your income the expenses database where you can log and calculate all outgoings finally a balance sheet database which calculates difference between the two as well as a couple of other cool things we'll finally work out how to connect those databases together using rollups in the second video of this series i'll show you the really exciting bit the dashboard views how you filter those and a really clever way to generate regular expenses and income using template buttons in this system wow that's a lot to do so let's get started there are chapter markers below let's dive into the build so the first thing you need is a clean page my financial tracker we're going to do empty with icons rather than a table because i want to insert various tables into the page i'm going to go to the top right and we're going to make it full width here you'll see there's an icon we can change the icon flying money tree and you can add a cover if you want why not i'm going to create the income database so we're going to do forward slash table i want to do a table in line so the name we're going to change to description we're going to change tags to month because i want to do this by month now you could do this by a date range if you wanted to keep it really searchable but i'm using tags because it's really simple and effective as a way of sorting a financial year tab this will be useful later when you want to search your archive and we'll make that also a select turn the tag this month into a select as well the financial year actually starts in april in britain but i'm going to do it from the start of the year so put in jam or we can click on it go to configure options and just whack some in there we go financial year i'm just going to put in this year why not put a second one in i quite like these to be all gray obviously you can just do it each year then we're going to want an amount of the income so let's just make that a number column you're going to then want a to set the currency for this to do that hover over it click on the little numbers here and set it to your currency mine is pounds but a lot of the viewers use the dollar so i'm going to make it dollars we're going to want an income type i'm going to make that select as well salary or it might be better creating you're also going to want a client or company so i've got description which might be the project or the specific job that it's referenced but i'm also going to create a list of clients and companies which then mean i can link to them later on now if you wanted to make this a linked database you could turn this into a relation by going in here and selecting let's say you have a database of clients you could easily link it to that or if you want to keep it simple you could just make it a multi-select depending on how many clients or a select the reason these are really useful is they allow you to create board views later on which you can then search by client and company or income type so you can have filtered views of your income pretty cool let's actually call this income we haven't done that i might want to link it to my wider system so i can go into here and call this related project so the income is related to projects in my wider system go here go to relation you can then select a database and i could do projects and my projects it could be linked to that the next thing we want to do is make sure that we're sorting this by the financial year and by the month so i'm just going to drop in my financial years as examples order so the first sort you're going to do is click on financial year in fact i'm going to bring that to the front and the month because those are the references that will be most used i'm going to click on financial year i'm going to go to sort ascending and you'll see that they are then sorted in the order of the financial year they're a part of and then we want a second sort which we can add sort ascending in month again means that this will be sorted by month in the order that these are put into the system so for example if i move feb to the top you'll see that that's then at the top if i go back in and adjust it to where it should be that all stays in the right order well that's all pretty simple stuff but it will get a lot more exciting later on when we start to link it to the expenses and the kind of dashboard view that this will be reported on next forward slash table we're going to do a table in line you guessed it expenses you could call it expenditure if you want whatever you like again change this description i'm going to change this to the month and turn it into a select and we do the same with this i think it's really important here that you match the colors in the expense database to the ones in the income database so it's much easier to follow it when you're viewing it as a whole the next one i put in is expense type you don't absolutely have to do this but it does mean again you can create a board view to just look at your bills subscriptions travel whatever you want to do particularly if you do self-employment stuff as a freelancer is really helpful i'm going to make it a select and i could put a few things in for example travel subs house bills i can claim in the uk a percentage of my house bills as a freelancer the next one we're going to add in of course is the financial year because we almost forgot to do that exactly the same as the one before so that was a select and we put in the years you get the idea and again i like to put the financial year in the month before the description you're going to want to put in the amount i'm doing this in a really strange order but you get the idea put the amount in again turn it into a number click on the number block and decide on your currency so we've got a lining up here you see months descriptions amounts my next one is actually going to be whether this is a fixed or variable expense so that means things that are constant which means you can just automatically populate each month or whether they're variable individual expenses that is going to be a select fixed variable next there's going to be a series of columns which will involve formulas that do all the kind of clever calculating of things against expenses we're going to do this as a copy and paste formula so i'm going to list the actual formulas down in the description so you can copy them but first of all let's just put all the columns in so the next column is going to be set budget simply going to be a number we set the currency set percentage claim this is first to set how much of the entire expense that we've had we might want to claim uh against taxes if you want to do that with this system now that is going to be a number as well but we're going to set this as a percentage you see their percent so we're going to put that in that we use for calculation later next column final expense claim this one's going to be a formula but we're not going to put in the formula just yet then we're going to do calculated percent claimed that is also going to be a formula but on the end we're going to do a files column called receipts if you wanted to put images of your receipts in there now a little disclaimer on this if you are using notion you have to be comfortable with the information that you lay out in this system so do your own research on the security around notion if you're comfortable with it then absolutely fill your boots but i just want to give you the tools so you can make your own decisions as to whether and how you're going to use this system there are two more formulas that we need to add planned expenses make sure you're typing these in exactly as i do because when i give you the formulas to paste in in a certain order in a moment make sure that it matches because it means that spaces capital letters all of that counts for the formula to line up with what you've titled your columns we're going to call it planned expenses that's also going to be a formula and then finally we're going to do status this one is going to be formula if i just move these over so we set an expense amount that we actually pay we set a budget for that how that lines up so then that will calculate what we planned against what yeah the actual was and give it a status so this will report on those saying on budget overspent or enter an amount we'll then also have final expense claim so if i put a percentage claim in here i'll then calculate the percentage of the amount that we're claiming if we're going to do that for example for tax and it will give us a final expense claim so this is all reports on the same system go into the description you'll see i've listed four formulas in order and it's really important that you put them in the right order because some of the later ones reference the first ones so you're just going to take it copy it this one is for calculated percent percent claimed click on the box type it in if it stays blue it's right but you could also if it's not working look at how it works and in this place you can insert your own if you've tight if you want to title them differently and click done that's that one so this is the final expense claim type that in great done so for example if i say it's 10 pounds for this travel and i'm going to claim 50 of it it calculates it how good is that we should probably with this click on the numbers and format it so that it stays the same yeah percentage claim then we're going to want planned expenses so we're going to put that in this just means that when you report on it you will be able to see what you've actually planned for an expensive expenses and stuff that wasn't planned for so if it's not budgeted for it isn't listed in planned if it is budgeted for it was planned finally we want to status as to whether we're on track or not so we're going to copy this in there again in the description and this simply says if it's planned expenses are greater or equal to the amount then you're on budget plans expenses are smaller than the amount that you've overspent otherwise enter an amount let's just show you what that means set a budget nine pounds i spent 10 overspend nothing in there enter an amount if the budget is 11 it's on budget and if the budget is 10 it's on budget that is now your expense system working if you have trouble with this again go back to the descriptions check them make sure that everything is correct and everything lines up with the description you've put in the column title to the bracketed parentheses nice word of what's there maybe we just call this view system and then it just means that um it's where all your programming goes yeah so the view is called system then the default view we can just call um archive and later on i'll show you how this all fits into the wider system we're actually going to do the same on this one so we'll call this table view click on the dots income archive again with whatever board view you add it needs to be sorted so we can go to financial year we want to sort ascending month ascending so it goes year then month and in your system view you might want to do the same do the same in income in my system view we've got our income and expense tables pretty much in place now for the exciting bit we're going to create the balance reports so we're going to use roll ups calculating your income against your expenditure [Music] make sure to hit the like button if you find this stuff valuable it goes a long way to support the channel let's dive in click on your title return so you've got a space you're gonna do forward slash toggle we're going to insert all of this into it so i'm going to call this the system view or you could call it your historic view whatever you want to call it there it is you're going to take both of these and we're going to lift them and place them into there after this section we can then create our dashboard that we actually run the system from make sure to subscribe as the dashboard and budget item generator builds are in the next video first of all though open up your toggle and below it we're going to return again and we're going to put in here forward slash table this one we're going to call balance we're going to make the main title the year we're going to change this to a roll up so you go down see this little magnifying glass symbol because it looks into other databases that's how you should think of a roll up and we're going to call this one total income we're going to do another roll up total expenditure i'm going to call it total outgoings then we're going to want a formula we'll build all this in a moment and this one is going to be gross yearly profit or profit loss we're going to do another formula and that one is going to be total claimed expenses and another formula and this one is going to be final yearly profit loss okay the next thing we need to do is make these roll ups work and in order to do that we need to connect things relate basically the income and expenditure um databases with the balance database first of all i'm going to put a year in here i'm going to call it 20 21. i'm going to create another one 2022 and in fact sort of sending very helpful so we're going to add in here create a relation and we're going to select income on the list okay that's the one create the relation and there it is related to balance each thing needs to be linked to one of these files yet so i'm just going to call this if i click on here and link it to the year it will then turn up in that year yeah now obviously you don't want to do that for every single thing but that is the joy of creating a dashboard in a moment that will help you do that but i'm just putting those in as you see i've put some made-up numbers for an example into the system so you see how it works okay now let's do the same in expenses so we're going to add another column up here go to create a relation this time select there it is create the relation expense relation and again for example's sake at this stage i want to relate that expense to the same year so you'll see let's just give this one a description [Music] so let's now calculate so total income i want to click on it the roll up select a relation we want to be the income relation so we're setting it up to that relationship we then want the property we show to be the amount there are all the amounts they're all listed it's rolling them up fantastic now what you now need to do is click sum it will add up the total the same with outgoings you're going to click select this time expenses this is going to be total amount of expenses so you're gonna click amount and you're going to click some 10 pounds i'm just going to add another example in here and we'll call this food shop so what we should now see is the total appears fantastic adds it all up that's total outgoings for gross yearly profit we first of all want to click on here and we want to make a sum so it's essentially going to be total income minus total outgoings it we need to then format it as you've done with everything else there you go it's worked it out now we need to look at these final two formulas that will complete this system total expenses claim now i told you this was a formula i forgot it's not and it doesn't matter we haven't done anything but it's a roll up just like the other ones but this time what we're going to do is select the relation as expenses as you can see but instead we're going to select a final expense claim because if we've adjusted the percentage claim to less than 100 of the expense because for example we can't claim it we need a final expense result what will happen in this system is whatever you put into the system unless you change the percentage it will say all of those expenses count against your business so you need to adjust that if you're wanting to use it so final expense claimed and then the sum of that now you'll see 110 in total outgoings 105 in claimed and that is because 50 of the 10 down here i've made the percentage claim less so that means that here we can make this formula a simple formula which is total income minus total expenses claimed you'll see therefore the income is five dollars more because we're claiming five less against the income brilliant you might want to add a view to balance here and let's call this one historic view and what we can do is in historic view is hide all of the formatting so that it becomes nice and clear you will probably want to in historic view sort it ascending and then the other one we can simply call system because this main database is going to become about the top uh is going to become the way that we view the historic information so you'll see here we then have a nice clear view of everything in order close that up and underneath this we are going to create the dashboard well if you've got this far you've got to the really exciting bit in the next video we'll create the main dashboard view that allows you to filter monthly views of your income and expenses for day-to-day use and i'll show you an amazing technique to create regular recurring expense and income items you can drop in just like that check out my full notion system template you can build it you can download it from bettercreating.com of course subscribe if you're not already and i'll see you on the next video

Channel: Better Creating

Views: 4,972

Keywords: Better creating, Expense tracker, How i budget in notion, How to budget in notion, How to create a budget in notion, My notion setup, Notion, Notion budget templates, Notion databases, Notion finance template, Notion financial tracker build, Notion how to, Notion setup, Notion template, Notion template tutorial, Notion tutorial, Step by step notion tutorial, a financial notion, budgeting in notion, financial tracker notion, notion expense tracker, notion finance tracking

Id: GV6-U1X4hJM

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021