Simple Bookkeeping Spreadsheet for IT Luddite

Mrs Shep and I have legal guardianship of our grown up daughter, which involves full responsibility for her welfare and finances. We will be expected to keep a record of all her financial ins & outs and to produce stats for the Office of Public Guardian as required. A simple bookkeeping spreadsheet seems logical but there’s a bewildering array online and I’m not competent enough to create one from scratch. Our main PC has MS Office and we both have Google accounts, so Excel and Sheets are options.

What’s simple to set up & follow, does the balancing and can be exported for auditing?

TIA

Not myself, but this looks like a reasonable money in and money out spreasdheet.

https://www.beginner-bookkeeping.com/excel-cash-book.html

I do my company accounts on a spreadsheet. It’s pretty easy to set one up. Just pick some suitable columns. Category, company, description, money in, money out, date, extra info, etc.

Easy to add an extra line for each new item. At the end of the year you can total up the in and out columns and arrange everything by the category or date or whatever you need.

Might seem a bit daunting to set one up from scratch but it needn’t be too complicated. You can also tweak as you go and realise you need something slightly different.

You can also use an online spreadsheet so either of you can access it from anywhere and it’s all backed up.

I’d probably use either Excel or Sheets.

I’ve never used it – I have no need to – but Xero is heavily advertised on the shite TV channels my partner watches.

“Exported” to what exactly?

Xero is a fantastic product but way beyond your needs, you don’t really need an accounting template – just a listing of expenses and a listing of income.  You may not even need a spreadsheet, one of those expense tracker apps might work for you _ I have no experience of those.

If the financial ins and outs are all from one bank account then  simplest option might just  be to download the statement each month as an XLS file (if your bank supports that its an option with my Santander account but not with my Smile one)

that’ll give you all the income and outgoings already in a spreadsheet and identify who the vendor is, then where necessary you can identity what the spend was for in another column

to be honest if you want to go full Luddite in the past in similar circumstances I’ve just printed out the PDF of the statement and written what the spend relates to on the print out in biro – each months statement went in a folder with any relevant receipts

Thanks all.