Templates › Money › Paycheck Budget

The Paycheque — the cheque you are in now, and a waterfall of where it goes; LEFT drops below the line when it cannot cover the bills

What it does

A budget that runs on paycheques, not months.

You are not paid monthly, so why is your budget? A calendar-month budget hides the thing that actually goes wrong: one paycheque carries the rent and the car payment and cannot cover them, while the next one has hundreds spare. This one shows you each paycheque on its own.

One paycheque at a time, drawn as a cheque.

The cheque at the top is the one you are in right now — the date, the amount, how many days until the next one. Under it, a waterfall: the whole take-home, then the bills that land before your next payday, your savings, and your spending plan falling away from it. What is LEFT stands at the end. When it cannot cover what lands in it, the last bar drops below the line in red.

It knows which bills land in which paycheque.

Type each bill once with the day of the month it is due. The sheet works out, for every paycheque, exactly which ones fall before the next payday — including a bill due on the 31st, which lands on the last day of shorter months by itself. That is the calculation nobody wants to do by hand.

See the bad paycheque coming.

Pay Periods lays out the next 26 in one table, with LEFT OVER on each. The rent paycheque going red every month is not a surprise you should have twice — it is a thing to move a due date for.

What's inside

6 tabs

The Paycheque — the current cheque drawn as a cheque, a waterfall of where it goes, the bills that land in it with their dates, and your spending plan against what you have actually spent
Pay Periods — the next 26 paycheques, each with bills, savings, plan, spent and what is left over
Set Up — how often you are paid, 25 monthly bills with due days, and 10 spending categories
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Start Here — plain-English setup, about five minutes
Sample data preloaded so you can see it working, then clear it in seconds

Why this one

Checked, not eyeballed

Weekly, every two weeks, twice a month or monthly — one dropdown, and every date in the sheet rewrites itself
No scripts, no permissions to grant — it works on the Google Sheets mobile app
2,807 checks against an independent simulation, run once for every pay frequency, including a bill due on the 31st in February and a paycheque that goes under water

Formulas568

Evaluation errors0

Independent checks2,807

Bugs caught before release2

Built natively in Google Sheets. 2,807 checks against an independent Python recomputation, 0 failures — the sheet was verified four times over, once for each HOW OFTEN option, by switching the selector and re-reading Google's own results: Weekly 689, Every 2 weeks 698, Twice a month 701, Monthly 719. Every payday, every period's bills, the shown paycheque, the waterfall fractions, the cheque, both lists and all 26 rows of Pay Periods are re-derived. Two bugs caught: the payday CHOOSE read the savings figure instead of the frequency index (every payday came back #NUM!), and the cheque's PAY TO THE ORDER OF label was clipped by its merge.

The details

What you get

A thank-you page and email with your view-only Google Sheets link — open it, then File → Make a copy
Real checkboxes, sparklines and charts, built natively in Sheets
Instant delivery after payment; the link never expires

Your data stays yours

You take a copy into your own Drive. Everything you type lives in your copy. You can never edit the master, and I can never see a number in yours.

Good to know

Digital product — nothing is posted. Google Sheets only; you'll need a free Google account. Works on the Sheets mobile app. Monthly bills only. For personal use; please don't resell or redistribute the file. Something not working? Email me and I'll fix it.

Refunds

Instant digital downloads can't usually be returned once delivered — but if something doesn't work, message me before asking for a refund and I will sort it out. Full policies.