How to calculate money needed for bills, by day
I think you might benefit from adopting a zero-sum budget, in which you plan where each dollar will be spent ahead of time, rather than simply track spending or worry about the next expense. Here's a pretty good article on the subject: How and Why to Use a Zero-Sum Budget. This is the philosophy behind a popular budgeting tool You Need a Budget, I am not advocating the tool, but I am a fan of the idea that a budget is less about tracking spending and more about planning spending. That said, to answer your specific question, one method for tracking your min-needed for upcoming expenses would be to record the date, expense, amount due, and amount paid as shown here:  Then the formula to calculate the min-needed (entered in E1 and copied down) would be: As you populate amounts paid, the MinNeeded is adjusted for all subsequent rows. You could get fancier and only populate the MinNeeded field on dates where an expense is due using IF(). If I understand you right, what you need is the minimum amount in the account until your next deposit.  So for example, if today is the 10th and you get paid on the 15th, how much do I need to have in the account, so I know how much I can spend?  That amount should be all of the bills that will be paid between today and the 15th. An alternative would just to keep a running balance and see what the minimum value is. My personal finance software does that for me, but it's possible, although a little more complicated, in Excel.  You'd have to find the date of the next deposit, and do a SUMIF looking for dates between today and that date.  That's about as far as I can get without getting off-topic. "Trying to figure out how much money you have available each day sounds like you're making this more complicated than it needs to be. Unless you're extremely tight and you're trying to squeeze by day by day, asking ""do I have enough cash to buy food for today?"" and so on, you're doing too much work. Here's what I do. I make a list of all my bills. Some are a fixed amount every month, like the mortgage and insurance premiums. Others are variable, like electric and heating bills, but still pretty predictable.  Most bills are monthly, but I have a few that come less frequently, like water bills in my area come every 3 months and I have to pay property taxes twice a year. For these you have to calculate how much they cost each month. Like for the water bill, it's once every 3 months so I divide a typical bill by 3. Always round up or estimate a little high to be safe. Groceries are a little tricky because I don't buy groceries on any regular schedule, and sometimes I buy a whole bunch at once and other times just a few things. When groceries were a bigger share of my income, I kept track of what I spent for a couple of months to figure out an average per month. (Today I'm a little richer and I just think of groceries as coming from my spending money.) I allocate a percentage of my income for contributions to church and charities and count this just like bills. It's a good idea to put aside something for savings and/or paying down any outstanding loans every month. Then I add these up to say okay, here's how much I need each month to pay the bills. Subtract that from my monthly income and that's what I have for spending money. I get paid twice a month so I generally pay bills when I get paid. For most bills the due date is far enough ahead that I can wait the maximum half a month to pay it. (Worst case the bill comes the day after I pay the bills from this paycheck.)  Then I keep enough money in my checking account to, (a) Cover any bills until the next paycheck and allow for the particularly large bills; and (b) provide some cushion in case I make a mistake -- forget to record a check or make an arithmetic error or whatever; and (c) provide some cushion for short-term unexpected expenses. To be safe, (a) should be the total of your bills for a month, or as close to that as you can manage. (b) should be a couple of hundred dollars if you can manage it, more if you make a lot of mistakes. If you've calculated your expenses properly and only spend the difference, keeping enough money in the bank should fall out naturally. I think it's a lot easier to try to manage your money on a monthly basis than on a daily basis. Most of us don't spend money every day, and we spend wildly different amounts from day to day. Most days I probably spend zero, but then one day I'll buy a new TV or computer and spend hundreds.  Update in response to question What I do in real life is this: To calculate my available cash to spend, I simply take the balance in my checking account -- assuming that all checks and electronic payments have cleared. My mortgage is deducted from my checking every month so I post that to my checking a month in advance. I pay a lot of things with automatic charges to a credit card these days, so my credit card bills are large and can't be ignored. So subtract my credit card balances. Subtract my reserve amount. What's left is how much I can afford to spend. So for example: Say I look at the balance in my checkbook today and it's, say, $3000. That's the balance after any checks and other transactions have cleared, and after subtracting my next mortgage payment. Then I subtract what I owe on credit cards. Let's say that was $1,200. So that leaves $1,800. I try to keep a reserve of $1,500. That's plenty to pay my routine monthly bills and leave a healthy reserve. So subtract another $1,500 leaves $300. That's how much I can spend. I could keep track of this with a spreadsheet or a database but what would that gain? The amount in my checking account is actual money. Any spreadsheet could accumulate errors and get farther and farther from accurate values. I use a spreadsheet to figure out how much spending money I should have each month, but that's just to use as a guideline. If it came to, say, $100, I wouldn't make grandiose plans about buying a new Mercedes. If it came to $5,000 a month than buying a fancy new car might be realistic. It also tells me how much I can spend without having to carefully check balances and add it up. These days I have a fair amount of spending money so when, for example, I recently decided I wanted to buy some software that cost $100 I just bought it with barely a second thought. When my spending money was more like $100 a month, lunch at a fast food place was a big event that I planned weeks in advance. (Obviously, I hope, don't get stupid about ""small amounts"". If you can easily afford $100 for an impulse purchase, that doesn't mean that you can afford $100 five times a day every day.) Two caveats: 1. It helps to have a limited number of credit cards so you can keep the balances under control. I have two credit cards I use for almost everything, so I only have two balances to keep track of. I used to have more and it got confusing, it was easy to lose track of how much I really owed, which is a set up for getting in trouble."
"I wrote a little program one time to try to do this.  I think I wrote it in Python or something. The idea was to have a list of ""projected expenses"" where each one would have things like the amount, the date of the next transaction, the frequency of the transaction, and so on.  The program would then simulate time, determining when the next transaction would be, updating balances, and so on.  You can actually do a very similar thing with a spreadsheet where you basically have a list of expenses that you manually paste in for each month in advance.  Simply keep a running balance of each row, and make sure you don't forget any transactions that should be happening. This works great for fixed expenses, or expenses that you know how much they are going to be for the next month.  If you don't know, you can estimate, for instance you can make an educated guess at how much your electric bill will be the next month (if you haven't gotten the bill yet) and you can estimate how much you will spend on fuel based on reviewing previous months and some idea of whether your usage will differ in the next month.  For variable expenses I would always err on the side of a larger amount than I expected to spend.  It isn't going to be possible to budget to the exact penny unless you lead a very simple life, but the extra you allocate is important to cushion unexpected and unavoidable overruns. Once you have this done for expenses against your bank account, you can see what your ""low water mark"" is for the month, or whatever time period you project out to.  If this is above your minimum, then you can see how much you can safely allocate to, e.g. paying off debt.  Throwing a credit card into the mix can make things a bit more predictable in the current month, especially for unpredictable amounts, but it is a bit more complicated as now you have a second account that you have to track that has to get deducted from your first account when it becomes due in the following month.  I am assuming a typical card where you have something like a 25 day grace period to pay without interest along with up to 30 days after the expense before the grace period starts, depending on the relationship between your cut-off date and when the actual expense occurs." I don't believe you would be able to with only Net Sales and COGS.  Are you talking about trying to estimate them?  Because then I could probably come up with an idea based on industry averages, etc.  I think you would need to know the average days outstanding, inventory turnover and the terms they're getting from their vendors to calculate actuals.  There may be other ways to solve the problem you're asking but thats my thoughts on it. "JoeTaxpayer's answer mentions using a third ""house"" account. In my comment on his answer, I mentioned that you could simply use a bookkeeping account to track this instead of the overhead of an extra real bank account. Here's the detail of what I think will work for you. If you use a tool like gnucash (probably also possible in quicken, or if you use paper tracking, etc), create an account called ""Shared Expenses"". Create two sub accounts under that called ""his"" and ""hers"". (I'm assuming you'll have your other accounts tracked in the software as well.) I haven't fully tested this approach, so you may have to tweak it a little bit to get exactly what you want. When she pays the rent, record two transactions: When you pay the electric bill, record two transactions: Then you can see at a glance whether the balances on ""his"" and ""hers"" match." If I is the initial deposit, P the periodic deposit, r the rent per period, n the number of periods, and F the final value, than we can combine two formulas into one to get the following answer: F = I*(1+r)n + P*[(1+r)n-1]/r In this case, you get V = 1000*(1.05)20 + 100*[(1.05)20-1]/0.05 = 5959.89 USD. Note that the actual final value may be lower because of rounding errors. I don't use a rule of thumb for this. Instead, I use a budget.  Throwing money into a savings account for the purpose of building a savings account is okay, but I only put money into a savings account that I have a purpose for.  For example, there are bills that come up once a year, such as insurance premiums, property tax, annual subscriptions and memberships, etc. I plan for these in my budget each month, and the money goes into my savings.  I also have an emergency fund, which is used in the event that a large, one-time, unexpected expense comes up that I hadn't planned for. I have a goal for how large I want this fund to be, so I put money in savings until it is built up to the level I want it at.  There are other long range saving goals I have: my next car, vacation, furniture replacement, technology replacement, etc. Each of these gets some money each month, which goes into savings.  I also have retirement savings in the budget, but that doesn't go into the savings account; it gets invested in my retirement account.  My point is that instead of arbitrarily choosing a percentage of your income to put into a savings account, think about the purpose of that money. That will help you determine how much needs to be saved, and it will also help motivate you to do so. R = I ^ P R = return (2 means double)  I = (Intrest rate / 100) + 1 [1.104 = 10.4%] P = number of periods (7 years)  2 = 1.104 ^ 7 (you double your money in seven years with a yearly Intrest rate of 10.4%) I = R^(1/P) 1.104 = 2^(1/7) P = log(R) / log(I)  7 = log(2) / log(1.104) Perhaps there is no single formula that accounts for all the time intervals, but there is a method to get formulas for each compound interest period. You deposit money monthly but there is interest applied weekly. Let's assume the month has 4 weeks.  So you added x in the end of the first month, when the new month starts, you have x money in your account. After one week, you have x + bx money. After the second week, you have x + b(x + bx) and so on. Always taking the previous ammount of money and multiplying it by the interest (b) you have. This gives you for the end of the second month:  This looks complicated, but it's easy for computers. Call it f(0), that is: It is a function that gives you the ammount of money you would obtain by the end of the second month. Do you see that the future money inputs are given with relation to the previous ones? Then we can do the following, for n>1 (notice the x is the end of the formula, it's the deposit of money in the end of the month, I'm assuming it'll pass through the compound interest only in the first week of the next month):  And then write:  There is something in mathematics called recurrence relation in which we can use these two formulas to produce a simplified one for arbitrary b and n. Doing it by hand would be a bit complicated, but fortunately CASes are able to do it easily. I used Wolfram Mathematica commands: And it gave me the following formula:  All the work you actually have to do is to figure out what will be f(0) and then write the f(n) for n>0 in terms of f(n-1). Notice that I used the command FullSimplify in my code, Mathematica comes with algorithms for simplyfing formulas so if it didn't find something simpler, you probably won't find it by yourself! If the code looks ugly, it's because of Mathematica clipboard formatting, in the software, it looks like this:  Notice that I wrote the entire formula for f(0), but as it's also a recurrence relation, it can be written as:  That is: f(0)=g(4). This should give you much simpler formulas to apply in this method. "Make a list of all your expenses. I use an Excel spreadsheet but you can do it on the back of a napkin if you prefer. List fixed expenses, like rent, loan payments, insurance, etc. I include giving to church and charity as fixed expenses, but of course that's up to you. List regular but not fixed expenses, like food, heat and electricity, gas, etc. Come up with reasonable average or typical values for these. Keep records for at least a few months so you're not just guessing. (Though remember that some will vary with the season: presumably you spend a lot more on heat in the winter than in the summer, etc.) You should budget to put something into savings and retirement. If you're young and just starting out, it's easy to decide to postpone retirement savings. But the sooner you start, the more the money will add up. Even if you can't put away a lot, try to put away SOMETHING. And if you budget for it, you should just get used to not having this money to play with. Then total all this up and compare to your income. If the total is more than your income, you have a problem! You need to find a way to cut some expenses. I won't go any further with that thought -- that's another subject. Hopefully you have some money left over after paying all the regular expenses. That's what you have to play with for entertainment and other non-essentials. Make a schedule for paying your bills. I get paid twice a month, and so I pay most of my bills when I get a paycheck. I have some bills that I allocate to the first check of the month and some to the second, for others, whatever bills came in since my last check, I pay with the current check. I have it arranged so each check is big enough to pay all the bills that come from that check. If you can't do that, if you'll have a surplus from one check and a shortage from the next, then be sure to put money aside from the surplus check to cover the bills you'll pay at the next pay period.  Always pay your bills before you spend money on entertainment. Always have a plan to pay your bills. Don't say, ""oh, I'll come up with the money somehow"". If you have debt -- student loans, car loans, etc -- have a plan to pay it off. One of the most common traps people fall into is saying, ""I really need to get out of debt. And I'm going to start paying off my debt. Next month, because this month I really want to buy this way cool toy."" They put off getting out of debt until they have frittered away huge amounts of money on interest. Or worse, they keep accumulating new debt until they can't even pay the interest." There is a way to get a reasonable estimate of what you still owe, and then the way to get the exact value. When the loan started they should have given you amortization table that laid out each payment including the principal, interest and balance for each payment. If there are any other fees included in the payment those also should have been detailed. Determine how may payments you have maid: did you make the first payment on day one, or the start of the next month? Was the last payment the 24th, or the next one? The table will then tell you what you owe after your most recent payment. To get the exact value call the lender. The amount grows  between payment due to the interest that is accumulating. They will need to know when the payment will arrive so they can give you the correct value. To calculate how much you will save do the following calculation: payment = monthly payment for principal and interest paymentsmade =Number of payments made = 24 paymentsremaining = Number of payments remaining = 60 - paymentsmade = 60-24 = 36 instantpayoff = number from loan company  savings = (payment * paymentsremaining ) - instantpayoff The easiest way to get started on a budget is just to track where you spend your money. If you have set bills each month I would make a category for each of those to make sure you have enough to pay. You can try and split up the remaining income into categories but the easiest way to start is just to track your spending for a month or two. This gives you a birds eye view of what is actually realistic. Start with that total as your preliminary budget and then adjust as you go along to meet other financial goals. We use neobudget.com for tracking our income. The solution to this problem is somewhat like grading on a curve. Use the consumption ratio multiplied by the attendance (which is also a ratio, out of 100 days) to calculate how much each person owes. This will leave you short. Then add together all of the shares in a category, determine the % increase required to get to the actual cost of that category, and increase all the shares by that %. No. It's the total on the bill statement that's reported, not the daily value. Pay before the bill is cut and you are fine. This is a great strategy for those who find their line to be too low.  Update - when I answered this, it was true, and pretty much went unchallenged. Some months back, a card I use changed banks. And my score blipped down. I had been on the habit of paying most of my balance in full the day of, or day before the statement was cut. I saw the balance reported on this card was as of the last day of the month, not the amount billed. I started paying the card's full balance on the 30/31 and the score returned to normal. This was the first I'd ever seen this, and no other member here has shared the same experience, yet. So hopefully you are not spending the money before you make it.  If you are, you are asking for trouble.  If not the solution is easy. If you use a spreadsheet for tracking have a item in your checking account running total that is simply CC to pay.   Lets say you just got paid, and your balance is like this: You can then do virtual withdrawals for each category In this case you have 70 left to spend.  Whoops the car gets a flat which costs you 5 that you put on the card and you also pay your rent by CC.  Then your spreadsheet should look like this: You still have the 70 left to spend, and when the CC bill comes due you are free to write the check. You have to track your spending for a month, down to the cent. Without those records, the person trying to help you has no real data. Even a week would be a start.  Heck, try just doing this today.  See if it works for you. Throughout each day: Each evening: At the end of a month (or week, or whatever period you want): Each day you do it successfully it will get easier.  Let us know how it works out!  Best wishes! "Stock support and resistance levels mean that historically, there was ""heavy"" buying/selling at those levels. This suggests, but does not guarantee, that ""someone"" will buy at ""support"" levels, and ""someone"" will sell at ""resistance levels. Any ""history"" is meaningful, but most analysts will say that after six months to a year, the impact of events declines the further back in time you go. They can be meaningful for periods as short as days."