Here’s how to track gift ideas and manage your Christmas gift budget with help from a spreadsheet. Ho ho ho!
Summary: Using Google Sheets to manage your Christmas gift budget and ideas keeps everything in one place instead of trying to remember it all. Track recipients, gift ideas, budgets, and actual costs, and use formulas to stay on budget.
Every year, I…
- Reboot my Christmas list file
- Create a new tab for this year, and
- Start filling in gift ideas and a list of people I’m going to buy for.
This year I thought I’d setup a template version, in case it’s helpful for anyone else out there! 😘
Manage your Christmas gift budget
Here’s the video (9min), where I run through the list setup and how to use it:
Here’s what’s covered:
0:25 Setting up the spreadsheet
0:36 Suggested fields: who it’s for, supplier, item, cost/budget, purchased, link and notes
1:00 Demo present entry
1:38 Adding the people you want to buy presents for
2:10 Setting all as ‘unpurchased’ to begin with
2:23 Allocating a budget for each person
3:15 Using conditional formatting to highlight purchased vs unpurchased
3:36 Calculating the total present budget, amount spent to date and cost remaining
5:10 How to update as you buy things
5:47 How to add a new person to the list
7:35 When to use
8:00 Benefits of a repeating list: seeing what you’ve bought for people before!
The ‘Present list spreadsheet’ is available as a template in Google Drive now, so feel free to make a copy via this link — and check out our other free templates too!
How do you keep track of your Christmas present list, and budget?