How to make a spending tracker for iPhone with Numbers

It’s all well and good setting out a budget for the month ahead, but it’s completely useless to you if you forget to record all of your expenses. Quickly, you’ll find that batch-entering weeks’ worth of expenses at a time becomes a chore, and you may end up abandoning your carefully thought out financial plan.

So let’s make things easier for ourselves in order to help us record our expenses on the fly, as and when they occur, using the amazing power of our iPhones. It’s really simple to set up a form through which you can input table data in seconds, using keypads and pop-up menus, if you like. You log expenses in your iPhone’s cash tracker, then simply copy it into your main budget every now and then – job done. Let’s get cracking.

1 Create the table

Make a table on a new blank sheet with a single Spent header to the right, setting the whole row to Currency format, and then rows for each expense. Add some dummy data for now.

2 Create the form

Hit the ‘+’ at the top-left and make a new form, choosing your table as the input when prompted. Each row in your table will be represented as a page in the new form.

3 Navigate the form

Enter in a value for the Spent cell by tapping the existing value (from your dummy data) or the blank field. Navigate rows/expenses using the arrow keys at the bottom.

4 Add a pop-up menu

Go back to your sheet and add an ‘on’ column. Set the cells to the Pop-Up menu format, then customise the pop-up items (including names and positions) in the options.

5 Tap to record

Back in your form, you can now choose a day of the week for your expense just by tapping. You can add more columns to your table if you want, but simple is best here.

6 Add new expenses

To record a new expense using the form, just tap the ‘+’ at the bottom to add a new row/ expense. Fill in all the details using your form and your table is automatically updated.

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