Does anyone know how I can do this spreadsheet thingy?

[LazySusan11]

Incredibly stupid person here when it comes to spreadsheets or budget apps. Anyway, we are buying a house and I want to be able to put all the costings into a spreadsheet, app whatever and each time we pay off something to do with the house I'd like it to deduct from the total so I can see where I am.

It sounds so simple I am sure there is something but I haven't found it!

I don't know about apps but that would be very easy to do on Excel. If you don't have Microsoft Office there are various free bits of software that work in very similar ways. OpenOffice is one, don't know what it's like.

I've not attempted to do anything like this on a phone or tablet. I would always use a desktop or laptop for spreadsheets, so maybe best to wait for someone more clued up to come along!

Having said all of that, I always enjoy doing things like this the oldfashioned way in a handwritten ledger or exercise book. If you're only after a way of recording your costs, and there are only a few of them, it does the job. You just need to be either very good at mental arithmetic or have a calculator or calculator app on your phone.

However you record it, you need your total budget at the top and then a running total of how much you've spent and what's left. You might want to consider putting in items you've not had to pay for yet but where you have committed to pay in the future, so you know another portion of your budget is already committed. I assume you have already worked out how much you think you might need to spend on each item. You need to keep an eye on how your spending matches your predictions, as if everything early on goes over you won't have as much left for the later items, and might need to cut something out, scale back or look for more funds.

Apologies if this is too basic! Good luck.

It is really simple - do you have a friend who works with spreadsheets daily? It would take them a couple of to minutes max up a nice little spreadsheet with do you to add stuff to auto calculate.