Build a budget you can trust

The difference between a useful budget and a plausible one is whether the totals recalculate. This guide gets you the first kind.

1. Ask with the shape you want

Vague requests produce vague sheets. Give it the columns:

Build a monthly budget for the Kathmandu office, April to March. Columns: month, budgeted, actual, variance, notes. Leave actual blank after August.

You get a sheet beside the conversation — a live grid, headers in the first row, totals written as real formulas like =SUM(B2:B13) rather than typed-in numbers. Change any input and everything downstream recalculates, which is the whole point.

2. Make it readable

Formatting is not decoration on a budget; it is how errors become visible. Ask for it directly:

Bold the header row, format the money columns as rupees with no decimals, and paint variance red when it is over ten per cent.

That is three tools — formatting, number formats, and a conditional rule — and one sentence. The rule is the valuable one: from then on the sheet flags its own outliers, including rows you add later.

3. Add the picture

Charts are never automatic. Ask:

Plot budgeted against actual by month as a column chart.

The chart lives beside the grid and follows the data.

4. Let it do the arithmetic, not the assistant

When you ask a question about the numbers — “which month blew the budget worst?” — say “check the sheet”. It reads the computed values rather than reasoning over a preview. For anything consequential, the sheet is the source of truth and the message is just commentary on it.

5. Get it into finance’s hands

Export to XLSX and formulas, formatting and charts survive. Export to CSV and you get values only, one tab at a time — fine for importing, wrong for review.

Things that save you a rewrite

Ask for tabs, not more sheets. “Add a second tab for last year” keeps one artifact. A second sheet splits the story in two.

Say when a column is derived. “Variance should be a formula, not typed” is worth saying once; the assistant defaults to real formulas but a terse request can still produce a static column.

Fix inputs, not outputs. If a total is wrong, the input is wrong. Correct the cell and let the formula do its job.

Next

• Spreadsheets — every sheet tool in detail
• Write a report from your own files — turning the numbers into prose