Personal budgeting is a critical but often dreaded task. Between keeping track of unpredictable expenses, changing income streams, and the general chaos of daily life, it can be tempting to avoid monitoring your finances too closely. However, budgeting is essential for financial stability and working towards savings goals.
Fortunately, with the right tools budgeting doesn’t have to be painful. Notion has become an incredibly popular all-in-one productivity platform, with a passionate community of users applying it to everything from note taking to project management. Notion is also uniquely well-suited for streamlining personal budgeting and finances.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the best Notion budget templates to simplify money management. You’ll learn:
- The key benefits of using Notion for budgeting
- An overview of 9 hand-picked Notion budget templates – with details on features, options for customizing, ideal users, and more
- How to set up and connect bank accounts for automated transactions
- Tips for actually sticking to your Notion budget – entering expenses, collaborating with others, analyzing reports
- Comparisons to traditional budgeting methods – how Notion makes things easier
Let’s dive in!
Why Budget with Notion?
Before we look at templates specifically, it’s helpful to understand why Notion is such a great choice for personal budgeting in the first place.
Flexible Tracking Options
Notion provides endless options for tracking financial data. Budget tabs can include:
- Tables for recording income, recurring expenses, one-time costs and more
- Charts visualizing spending by category
- Dashboard overviews of key budget metrics
- Calendar views of due dates and deadlines
- And much more, with full customization
Whether you prefer granular details or high-level snapshots, Notion allows budgets tailored to your preferences.
Automation Capabilities
Entering every single expense manually can quickly become tedious and difficult to keep up with. Notion allows you to connect financial accounts to automatically import and categorize transactions. Credit card, bank account, even investment information can be pulled in.
This keeps your budget constantly up to date with minimal effort. We’ll cover how to set this up later in the guide.
Template Galore
Notion’s template gallery offers pre-made budgeting templates suited for all types of users. Templates provide helpful starting points that you can then customize as needed.
We’ll overview 12 awesome options for personal finance tracking later on.
Accessibility and Collaboration
As a cloud-based platform, Notion offers access to your budget anywhere – across devices and operating systems. The mobile apps make entering expenses on the go simple.
You can also easily collaborate with others on a shared budget, like for families or roommates. Give editing access or keep things read-only.
Okay, let’s check out some templates!
12 Killer Notion Budget Templates
Here are 12 awesome Notion templates for streamlining personal budget tracking and money management:
1. Budget Planning
Budget Planning is a free, simple template focused on the essentials of expense tracking.
Key Features:
- Dashboard overview
- Tables to log income, expenses, and savings
- Charts showing spending breakdown
- Formulas to calculate totals, percentages, etc.
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Budget Planning dashboard view
The simplicity makes Budget Planning a great starting point or option for those new to finance tracking. As needed you can always add more detailed breakdowns or visuals.
2. Budget Tracker Template
For those wanting more robust tracking capabilities, the creatively named Budget Tracker Template is an excellent choice.
Standout Features:
- Income, expense, and savings goals tables
- Charts and key metric snapshots
- Reminders and status tracking
- Budgeting tips and help documentation
Designed thoughtfully, the Budget Tracker Template combines simplicity with powerful functionality for most standard use cases. Sections and tables come ready to populate with your figures and transactions.
3. Personal Finance Tracker Templates
This collection of Personal Finance Tracker templates has options tailored to different styles and complexity preferences.
For example, the trackers include:
- Minimal – Great for users who prefer simple interfaces and maximum white space
- Modern – More visuals, color coding, gauges, and unique layouts
- Simple – As the name suggests, a straightforward no-frill tracker
All the templates still contain core expense tables, income logs, goal setting, and key reporting. You choose the tracker format best matching your personal preferences.
4. Financial Tracker
The aptly named Financial Tracker offers comprehensive finance oversight capabilities.
What sets this template apart:
- Sections to track debt, savings goals, investments
- Asset allocation/portfolio analysis
- Monthly, quarterly and yearly reporting
- Attaching files capability – store receipts, statements etc.
If you want to level up beyond basic budgeting to full financial planning and net worth tracking, Financial Tracker is a phenomenal head start.
5. Finance and Budgeting Template
For even more features and customization check out this Finance and Budgeting Template from Prototion.
Standout highlights:
- Multi-currency support – manage budgets across countries
- Income vs expense comparison
- Progress tracking with simple +2 button logging
- both yearly and monthly views
Prototion specializes in building Notion templates across domains, and it shows in this budgeting template’s unique offerings.
6. Expenses Tracker
Next up we have the Expenses Tracker template focusing specifically on cost monitoring and oversight.
Helpful for:
- Identifying expense trends over time
- Setting category based monthly spending budget
- Tracking recurring vs one-time costs
- Easy importing of transactions from connected accounts
Between the visual dashboard and powerful table filtering, Expenses Tracker makes keeping costs under control effortless.
7. Personal Finance Tracker
For comprehensive financial planning, this aptly named Personal Finance Tracker delivers.
Benefits:
- Custom categories for income sources and expense tracking
- Notes and documentation capability
- Receipt logging
- Goal setting and key milestone tracking
- Summaries and reporting
The template is extensive without being overwhelming, and facilitates both high level snapshots and lower transaction details.
8. Simple Finance Tracker
Prefer minimal interfaces? The Simple Finance Tracker offers core budgeting functionality with no frills.
Highlights:
- Track income, expenses, account balances
- Charts and graphs providing visual data insights
- Summary dashboard overview
- Easy monthly and yearly reporting
Straightforward yet powerful, Simple Finance Tracker is great for no-fuss budgeting.
9. Automated Budget Tracker
Rounding our off our featured templates is this Automated Budget Tracker from NotionHub.
And yes – it offers full automation!
Benefits:
- Auto-import transactions from connected financial accounts
- Auto-categorization into customizable spending buckets
- Notifications on hitting expense limits
- Charts and graphs to visualize spending over time
The template does the tedious transaction entry work for you, while still providing detailed tracking and reporting. Win win!
Compare Top Budgeting Tools
Beyond Notion, there are dozens of apps for budgeting and expense tracking both free and paid versions. Spreadsheets are another common DIY option.
Below we compare key advantages Notion offers over other budgeting software solutions:
| Feature | Notion | Spreadsheets | Budgeting Apps |
| Setup time | Templates accelerate creation | Manual setup from scratch | Still some manual configuration |
| Learning curve | Intuitive with helpful templates | Moderate learning | Varies greatly across apps |
| Expense tracking | Manual or auto-import | Mostly manual | Usually manual |
| Customization | Fully customizable | Limited formatting | Moderate customization |
| Accessibility | All devices + sharing | Limited access and sharing | Usually single user |
| Price | Free or $8+/month | Free | Freemium model |
The biggest advantages of Notion are the templates accelerating setup, automation capabilities, and real-time expense tracking. For most people Notion provides the easiest way to create a sustainable, effective budget.
Okay, let’s look next at how to configure transaction importing for effortless tracking…
Automating Transaction Imports
Manually logging every single expense or income transaction is time consuming and challenging to keep up with consistently.
Thankfully, Notion allows automatic importing directly from connected financial accounts. Credit cards, bank accounts, investment portfolios and more can send data to auto-populate your Notion budget template tables.
Here is the step-by-step process to set this up:
Step 1: Connect Financial Account
Inside Notion, click the search icon and choose the “Connect Bank Account” integration.
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You can connect accounts across 100+ financial institutions and services using Plaid. Select your bank, credit union, or credit card provider.
Step 2: Enter Credentials
On the institution website, login to your account and then grant access permissions to share transactions with Notion. What type of read access is allowed varies across institutions.
Step 3: Configure Auto-Import
Once connected, you can specify:
- Table for imported transactions
- Filter criteria – only grab certain categories, date ranges etc.
- Auto categorization rules to assign budget labels
- Update frequency – daily, weekly etc.
Automation will now continually populate your Notion budget with all needed transactions, eliminating manual effort!
Tips for Sticking to Your Budget
Leveraging an automated Notion budget template sets you up for success. But getting consistent about financial tracking takes work too.
Here are some tips for actually sticking to your Notion budget and building sustainable money management habits:
Enter Transactions Promptly
For any purchases not auto-imported, make it a rule to log them into your Notion budget as soon as possible. Whether a coffee shop run or online purchase, enter it before you forget. This ensures you always have an accurate financial picture.
Review Reports Frequently
Leverage Notion’s reporting capabilities to spot budget issues early. Run income and expense reports weekly or monthly. Are categories way off budget? If so determine why and make any needed adjustments for next period.
Analyze Charts and Trends
Beyond topping reports, scroll through dashboard charts to spot upward or downward trends. Surging grocery costs month over month might indicate changing habits. Visualizations make patterns clear quickly.
For family or roommate budgets, collaborate via shared template access. Though visibility settings can limit editing ability if desired. Entering expenses consistently will have the biggest impact.
Building solid budgeting habits takes time, but becomes easier over time. Starting with a thoughtful Notion template accelerates everything.
Go Make a Budget in Notion!
Personal budgeting is a nearly universal struggle. Thankfully Notion offers an immense selection of templates tailored to any financial tracking need – whether an individual, family, small business and more.
We walked through 12 awesome budget templates packed with capabilities. You have everything needed to:
- Log income streams and expenses
- Visualize spending patterns over time
- Set saving goals
- Receive automated transaction imports directly from financial accounts, credit cards, and more
Beyond saving you time, Notion provides easy access from any device and simplifies collaboration with housemates or family members. Plus further customization is always an option too.
Notion lowers every friction point and barrier to starting (and actually maintaining) a personal budget. Now is the time to get your financial house in order!
Begin by selecting a template that resonates based on detail level preferences, complexity tolerance, desired collaboration, and other needs. Setup is fast thanks to pre-built content and frameworks in every template.
Here‘s to achieving financial peace of mind and making progress towards your money goals in 2023! Give budgeting with Notion a try.
