The Marble Jar Channel

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel, and in today’s video, I will review the Aspire Budgeting spreadsheet and app. This is part of a series where I give my thoughts on a bunch of budgeting systems.

I happen to love this souped up Google spreadsheet budget. I am a spreadsheet fan in general and I’m impressed with just how much this developer was able to do inside the limitations of a cloud-based spreadsheet app. To access the spreadsheet, go to AspireBudgeting.com and click the button to copy the spreadsheet to your own Google Drive. It is both way simpler than normal budgeting apps and also has a little steeper learning curve.

First of all – it is entirely free. I’m guessing it started as a personal spreadsheet and the developer decided to make it available to others. He has a Patreon account that you can contribute to, but there doesn’t appear to be any other way that he is making money from this passion project. There is no linking of your financial accounts, it is all manual entry. It does sync between devices since it is a Google spreadsheet which is already cloud-based. You just access it with your regular Gmail/Google drive password. Some avid Aspire Budgeting fans have also partnered with this developer to create some mobile apps. Since I was unsuccessful on getting those apps to work on my phone, this review will be primarily about the spreadsheet, but I will touch on the apps at the end.

Once you click the button to copy the Aspire Budgeting spreadsheet to your Google Drive, you can name it whatever you want. There is a set up process, and since this is not an app with a prescribed set up process, you’ll need to do some reading to begin. This first tab is the getting started guide. It gives you a bunch of instructions. It’s a little overwhelming, but you soon get the hang of it. The second tab is where you enter your currency and date formats. Now that we’ve gotten to this point, I’m going to walk through the main elements of budgeting systems much as I have in other review videos. First let’s talk about

You set up your accounts in the configuration tab. It is as simple as typing in names under either the Bank accounts/cash column or the Credit card column. Next let’s set up some

These are also set up in the configuration page. It is super straightforward with the category budget category names in this column and the amount that you want to budget for them in this column. Aspire pre-populates this with some default items, but you can edit, add, and delete to your heart’s content. The only tricky thing is this little symbol here right. This indicates the type and there are 4: budget group (they call it a category group), reportable category (or one that appears in their budget reports), non-reportable category, or credit card category. So, you can see that I have lots of reportable budget items here that are part of a budget group called monthly expenses. I also have one credit card category. Once you set these up, Aspire warns you to try not to modify them. Changing the names later could create some problems within the spreadsheet since everything is linked. This is also the screen where you can set up goal amounts. For example, you could put in a goal to save a certain amount for Christmas gifts. OK, now that we’ve set up our budget line items, let’s talk about

For this, you will go to the transactions tab. Again, this is pretty straightforward. Enter each spending transaction and choose the budget category and account from these drop-down lists. In addition, this is where you enter the starting balance for your accounts. All of your transactions are entered on this tab, but clicking on the Balances tab will show you those transactions filtered by account. Entering transactions seems pretty straightforward, but I could still see myself getting annoyed by having to scroll down to the end of the list to enter new ones by the end of the year. OK, now we have our account set up, our budget line items set, and our transactions. How do we

So, Aspire Budgeting is an envelope system. If I had to guess, I would say it’s almost entirely based on YNAB’s interface. With envelope budgeting, you don’t just set up budgeted amounts and forget about them, you have to fill your envelopes monthly. Aspire refers to these as category transfers and there is a tab for that. I wish this was called something different, but I imagine you get used to it. On the first of each month (or whenever your budgeting interval is), you would enter a transfer from Available to Budget (which refers to all of your cash on hand that isn’t already allocated) to a budget envelope or line item. You can see I’ve done that here. If it were me, I would create a template for this and paste it in each month. Then you are done in 30 seconds. Each time you allocate money, it reduces the amount in Available to Budget up here. So now let’s look at

In Aspire, this is found on the Dashboard tab. This shows what is available in each of your budget envelopes, how much you spent (Activity), and how much you budgeted. You can’t click through to the transactions for each budget item, but you can plug in the budget category here on the right to get a little more information. If you have a negative amount in an envelope, you will need to cover that from another item that has available funds. You can do another category transfer, this time between one budget line item and another. For example, to cover this negative amount, I would put in a transfer transaction that shifts that amount from food to housing. Unfortunately, you can’t go back to a previous month or forward to the next month – you can only view the current month.

Aspire has lots of other reports. Account reports show a chart of annual outflows and inflows (an income and expense report). Category reports show a bar chart with budgeted versus actual spend (like a traditional budget). That same data is shown in the table below. There are also net worth reports, spending reports, and trend reports. And, since your data is already in spreadsheet form, depending on your facility with spreadsheets, you can easily create your own reports, charts, and graphs.

Most of the other things that I look for in a budgeting app are unnecessary because of the spreadsheet format. For example, there’s no need to provide a search functionality, since that is built into Google sheets. No need to export, since it’s already in spreadsheet form. Split transactions should be put in as multiple line items. There is good documentation for Aspire Budgeting. There also seems to be an active and avid fan base and some Reddit forums to ask questions and exchange information. The developer seems very responsive to requests and feedback.

I’m disappointed I was unable to get the mobile app to work – it crashed every time I try to login. However, from the information on the App Store, it appears to give you the ability to see your dashboard (or your budget view), see your account balances, and enter transactions. I think this last function would be really useful and eliminate the need for all of that scrolling, which I mentioned before.

All in all, if you are a spreadsheet aficionado and don’t mind manually entering transactions, this may just be the solution for you. Let me know what you think. Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.