Creating a Budget in Airtable

Is there a specific reason that you are looking to do this in Airtable? While it could likely be done, I feel like you would be much better served if you were using an app that was specifically designed from the ground up for budgets, such as Quicken (or one of Quicken’s other financial apps). Quicken will even automatically communicate with all of your banks in real-time — and automatically bring in all of your transactions — so you don’t need to constantly be importing CSV files.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Hm, what issues have you been facing?  For me the biggest issue was categorizing all of the different type of spend, I ended up with a table dedicated to keyword matching the categories (e.g. ‘McDonalds’ went to ‘Food’, ‘Uber’ went to ‘Transport’ etc

Once that was sorted using the Dashboard to throw up some pretty charts and pivot tables was nice

I assume you’re planning on using the CSV Import extension to import data? https://airtable.com/marketplace/blk9eXKffGfv1BjKQ/csv-import

I do free half hour calls, so hit me up and we can do a quick troubleshooting session if you’d like!  https://calendly.com/adamc_airtable/30min

Thank you, I might end up at Quicken.  I’ve used it before and have found budgeting software difficult for me to stick to, so I thought if I created my own I’d be more loyal and stick to it.  

Hi Adam, thank you for your reply.  I might take you up on a call … gonna try and figure out this weekend.  The csv import app looks great!

Yes, it is possible that you might be more loyal if you created your own app, but one thing to note is that things that are very easy to do in Quicken are either extremely difficult (or even impossible) to do in Airtable. For example, keeping track of recurring income/expenses (Airtable doesn’t have a built-in mechanism for anything that repeats over time — you would need to custom-create this on your own with automations), keeping track of running totals (this is extremely challenging to setup in Airtable), communicating directly with your banks (this is not possible with Airtable), and more.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

That makes a lot of sense, appreciate your heads ups.  I’m leaning more toward Quicken - thank you for the reminder about that platform.

Hm, for what it’s worth, I’ve set up recurring income / expenses stuff with an automation that triggers on a schedule, e.g. once a month

Running totals based on time periods or categories were also straightforward to set up

For the bank link thing, it really depends on the bank?  Some would allow you to do a direct sync like Mercury, and if not you’d look into other integrations that might do it automatically.  A bit of googling will give you options like Fintable (https://fintable.io/), but any service that can grab your bank data and integrate with Make or Zapier or something would let you grab your data too if you don’t want to do the CSV importing

As Adam mentioned, the real pain is automating categorization along with the way transactions are reported through the banking system at times (i.e. transaction vendor IDs are all non-standard, some have store ID numbers in them or stuff).

Airtable is nice for quick querying IMO, and I’ve been using it for low key budget analysis this past year, but not intensively (which also works because I don’t use it enough to bother paying for/learning Quicken). 

A quick tip I find useful for these kinds of implementation are to include single select formula fields that interpret your transaction date into single select month and single select year fields. That comes in handy for grouping/filtering, and is really handy if you want to make a dashboard or something. 

For further reference, what ​@DisraeliGears01 means by single select formula fields are actually formula fields for which the format is set to output a single select option. You can check how to set these up here. A similar solution (or you might even want to use both plus an additional automation), is to use time frames (e.g. months) as linked record fields. So you’d have a Timeframes table where you have Jan 2025, Feb 2025, so on and so forth. Each expense will get linked to such time frame record. In that way, you can rollup data per time frame.

Feel free to grab a slot using this link if you’d like to go through your use case in further detail I’d be happy to show you around some best practices.

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join our Airtable Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!! This might even be a fun use case :D

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
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