Free Google Sheet · not a signup wall
Free business expense tracker — a Google Sheet you can start using today.
Log every expense by category and watch the Dashboard total it up automatically — monthly totals, a spend trend, and your biggest category, no formulas to build yourself. Free template, yours to copy. Built by a real person, not a signup wall.
The Dashboard tab
Spend by category
What it is / who it’s for
An expense tracker that actually shows you where the money goes
Most expense spreadsheets are just a list — rows going down, nothing adding up. This one is a list and a dashboard. Log an expense with a date, vendor, category, and amount, and the Dashboard tab rolls it up on its own: total spend, your biggest category, a monthly average, a category breakdown, and a month-by-month trend line.
It’s a real Google Sheet. You make a copy, you own it, it’s free.
No trial, no card, no “book a demo to unlock.” Who it’s for:
- Solo founders and freelancers who want a real expense picture without opening accounting software.
- Small business owners tracking rent, software, marketing, and the rest of the monthly bill pile in one place.
- Anyone who just wants to know where this month’s money actually went, at a glance.
The honest part: this is the manual version. You type each expense in yourself. That’s on purpose — it’s free, it works, and if you later want it to fill itself in from your bank or books, that’s the paid build.
What’s inside
What’s inside the sheet
Two tabs, ready to use, with 14 sample rows already filled in (April–July 2026) so you can see it working before you touch it:
- Expenses — one row per expense: date, vendor, category, amount, notes. Categories cover the basics — Rent, Utilities, Software, Office Supplies, Marketing, Travel, Meals, Professional Services — or rename them to fit your business.
- Dashboard — the rollup: KPI tiles for Total Spend, Biggest Category, and Monthly Average, a Spend by Category table, and a Monthly Trend table with a line chart, all built on SUMIF/SUMIFS formulas that recalculate the moment you add a row.
The math it does for you:
- Total spend — every logged expense, added up live.
- Spend by category — a SUMIF rollup per category, so you can see what’s actually eating your budget.
- Monthly trend — a SUMIFS table by month, charted, so you can see if spend is climbing or flat.
- Biggest category & monthly average — calculated for you on the Dashboard tile row, no scrolling required.
Header row is frozen, amount columns are currency-formatted, and the categories already match a typical small-business chart of accounts — open it and it just works.
Get the free template
Get the free template
Click through and make your own copy right now — no email required, no catch.
Or skip the setup entirely. Send your email and a recent expense export, and I’ll put your real numbers into it for you — free, usually within a business day. You keep it either way, and there’s no follow-up sequence.
Prefer to skip both? Email me at colin@automatedworkflowllc.com and I’ll send the link straight over. Based in Gainesville, FL — working with small businesses everywhere.
The paid version
Want it connected to your real books? That’s the $650 build.
This free sheet is the manual version — every expense is one you key in by hand, in flat starter categories. It’s genuinely useful as-is. But if you’re running real volume across a real business, the typing (and reconciling it against your bank at month-end) gets old fast.
The paid version fixes that:
- Self-updating — connected to where your expenses actually live (bank export, QuickBooks, or your books directly) instead of you re-typing them, so the Dashboard is just true, live.
- Built on YOUR categories — your real chart of accounts, multiple entities if you run more than one business, budgets and variance if you want them — not flat defaults.
- An AI weekly spend note — a plain-English Monday summary: what you spent, what changed vs. last month, and anything that looks off.
And you don’t buy it blind — I build a working demo on your real numbers first, free, in about a day. See it actually run, then decide.
Who made this
Who made this
I’m Colin McCarthy, and Automated Workflow is me — a real person in Gainesville, FL, building Google Sheets tools for people who’d rather run their business than fight their spreadsheet. I work with small businesses and solo founders all over the US, remotely.
- A free tool with no catch. You copy it and it’s yours — no account, no expiry.
- Your data is yours. This is a template you copy into your own Drive; I never see your numbers unless you hire me and choose to share them.
- I answer my own email and phone — colin@automatedworkflowllc.com, (703) 939-1174.
- Trained craft. Anthropic Academy certified in AI-assisted automation, and reviewed publicly on Upwork.
Ready when you are
Grab the free template
Make your copy, start logging expenses in two minutes, and see your real spend picture — category breakdown and trend included — today.
Get the free template →Want it self-updating on your real books? See the $650 automated dashboard or book a free 1-day demo. Based in Gainesville, working with small businesses everywhere.
Questions people ask