Free for Excel, Google Sheets or PDF. One thing to know before you start: you answer the questions first, and the file is built from your answers at the end. That takes about five minutes, and there is no signup.
A blank template is a grid of empty cells sitting under somebody else's category names. It hands the entire job back to you: work out what you earn in a month when you are paid fortnightly, decide whether the car rego belongs under Transport or under Insurance, remember the power bill that only turns up once a quarter. Most people get four rows in and close the tab. The file was never the hard part.
Budget Genie turns that around. It asks the questions in order, converts every amount to a common period as you go, and hands the spreadsheet back at the end with your figures already in the rows and the arithmetic already done. What lands in your downloads folder is the finished thing rather than the starting point.
You keep it either way. It is your file, on your computer, with no expiry on it and no account attached to it.
This is the sheet structure, not a mock-up of one. The sample below belongs to a household paid $2,160 a fortnight, and shows how each row is laid out and how the totals are put together.
| Spreadsheet row | Item | Category | Amount | How often | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | MONEY IN | ||||
| 7 | Salary (after tax) | Salary | 2,160.00 | Fortnightly | 4,680.00 |
| 8 | Total money in | 4,680.00 | |||
| 10 | MONEY OUT | ||||
| 11 | Rent or mortgage | Rent/Mortgage | 1,500.00 | Monthly | 1,500.00 |
| 12 | Groceries | Groceries | 150.00 | Weekly | 650.00 |
| 13 | Electricity | Utilities | 420.00 | Quarterly | 140.00 |
| 14 | Car insurance | Insurance | 984.00 | Annual | 82.00 |
| 15 | Internet | Utilities | 85.00 | Monthly | 85.00 |
| 16 | Total money out | 2,457.00 | |||
Cells shaded are live formulas rather than typed numbers. The Per month cell on row 7 holds this, which is why editing an amount or a frequency inside the file still leaves you with the right total:
=IF(D7="Weekly",C7*52/12,IF(D7="Fortnightly",C7*26/12,IF(D7="Monthly",C7,IF(D7="Quarterly",C7/3,IF(D7="Annual",C7/12,0)))))Anything you owe is listed separately, with the balance and the rate carried through, so the sheet still makes sense in six months when you have forgotten what the rate was.
| Spreadsheet row | Name | Type | Balance owing | Rate % p.a. | Repayment | How often | Repayment per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19 | Car loan | Loan | 12,400.00 | 8.50 | 310.00 | Fortnightly | 671.67 |
The last block points at the totals above it rather than repeating them, so the bottom line keeps up with any edit you make higher in the sheet.
| Money in | 4,680.00 |
|---|---|
| Money out | 2,457.00 |
| Debt repayments | 671.67 |
| Savings and goals | 200.00 |
| Left over each month | 1,351.33 |
Regular savings and savings goals get blocks of the same shape when you enter them, and a goal row carries its target, what you have put aside already and the date you are aiming for. Sections you leave empty are never written at all, so nobody ends up with a Childcare heading sitting over an empty range.
The download step offers each of these separately. Taking one does not rule out the others, and none of them costs anything.
A single worksheet called Budget, with the column widths already set and money cells formatted to two decimal places. It opens in Excel, and equally in Numbers on a Mac or in LibreOffice if that is what you have. There are no macros in it, so no security warning bar appears across the top when you open it.
Saved as budget-genie-2026-07-28.xlsx, stamped with the day you built it.
The very same workbook, which Google Sheets reads directly. Save it, then open sheets.google.com, choose File, then Import, and select it. Sheets keeps the formulas live on the way in because the file sticks to functions both programs share, so your per month column still recalculates once it is up there.
Worth doing if you want it on your phone, or shared with whoever you split the bills with.
One A4 page, built for printing rather than for editing. It leads with what you have left over or are short by, lists the same five summary lines, then breaks your spending down by category with a percentage against each one. It carries its own note about what the numbers do and do not mean, so the page still makes sense to whoever you hand it to.
The one to use for a lender, a broker, or the fridge door.
Yes, completely, and there is no paid tier of the file. You get the same Excel workbook, the same Google Sheets version and the same PDF whether you ever open a ClearBalance account or not. Nothing is watermarked and nothing is held back for an upgrade.
No. There is no account, no email field and no verification step in front of the download. Your figures stay in your own browser while you work and are never sent to us, so there is nothing for us to collect even if we wanted to.
Yes. The Google Sheets button hands you the same .xlsx workbook, which Sheets imports natively. Go to sheets.google.com, choose File, then Import, then pick the file you just saved. The workbook deliberately avoids macros and Excel-only functions so nothing breaks on the way across.
It is an ordinary spreadsheet sitting on your own computer, so yes. Rename the categories, add rows, delete the ones that do not apply to you, change an amount when your rent goes up. Nobody can reach in and alter it afterwards.
They do. The Per month column is a live calculation rather than a pasted number, and the section totals are SUM ranges over it. Change an amount, or switch a line from Monthly to Fortnightly, and every total below it moves on its own.
Because the empty version is the one that gets abandoned. We only publish the filled version, which makes the five minutes of questions part of the deal rather than an optional extra. If you would rather have a bare grid to fill in yourself, plenty of sites publish one. What we can give you is the same spreadsheet with your own numbers already in it, five minutes from now.
Curious what gets worked out along the way? The budget calculator page runs the arithmetic on a full set of numbers, including what a debt costs over its life.
Answer the questions, see where you stand, then take the file in whichever format suits you. No account, no email, no card.
Start building it