How to Manage Your Personal Finances With Microsoft’s ‘Money in Excel’ Feature

If you want to manage your financial accounts but don’t need a full-featured and expensive program like Quicken, Microsoft offers a free add-on service called Money in Excel. This option helps you integrate your bank accounts and other financial data into Excel so you can track your expenses, spending habits, investments, and more.

The Money in Excel template can retrieve account information at most major financial institutions. Access to your accounts is performed through a third-party plugin provided by Plaid, which handles permissions between you and Microsoft. You connect your financial data to Plaid, but Plaid does not share login credentials with Microsoft. (For more information about the security and privacy aspects of this feature, check out Microsoft’s Money in Excel FAQ.)

As a premium Excel template, Money in Excel is available to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers in the US. The feature is accessible only on the desktop; it won’t work on mobile. Here’s how to use Money in Excel to manage your personal finances right from a spreadsheet.

Get Money in Excel

Before you can start using Money in Excel, you must first add it to your instance of Excel. To grab the Money template, go to Microsoft’s Money in Excel page and sign in as a Microsoft 365 subscriber. Click Edit in Browser to add the template to the browser-based version of Excel or click Download to get it for the desktop version of the program.

Both versions work the same. If you want to use Money in Excel anywhere from any computer, choose the browser-based version. If you want to restrict it to just specific computers on which Excel is installed locally, go with the download option. 

After choosing the browser version, click the Continue button to add the template. With the Download option, download and open the XLTX file. After the file opens in Excel in Protected View, click the Enable Editing button at the top to add the template.

Click the Welcome and Instructions tabs at the bottom of the worksheet to learn how to set up and use Money in Excel. Click the Sign in button in the Money in Excel pane on the right-hand side to log in with your Microsoft account.

Connect Your Financial Accounts

Next, you need to sync your financial accounts to Excel. The right-hand pane explains how Plaid will connect to your financial accounts and how Microsoft uses Plaid. Click Continue through each screen to proceed through the setup.

The next screen presents a list of banks. Choose the bank at which you have an account to incorporate your financial information. If you don’t see your bank listed, type its name in the Search field at the top and select it from the results.

Sign in with your bank account credentials and click Submit. Then choose how you want to receive a security code to authenticate your identity. You can select email, phone call, or text. Click Continue, enter the code in the appropriate field, and then click Submit.

If you have more than one account at the bank you chose, check the accounts you want to view in Excel. Click Continue, and your accounts are then synced to your Excel workbook. From the right-hand pane, click the Add account or transaction entry and select Connect an account or Add a manual account if you wish to add an additional bank account.

View and Filter Data

Your transactions from the accessed accounts then appear in the workbook, specifically in the Transactions worksheet. Click the Transactions tab and scroll through each transaction to view the date, merchant, category, amount, account, account number, and institution.

You’ll see that the necessary header row and data filtering are automatically turned on in the worksheet, allowing you to change the sort order in each column. Click the down arrow next to a column heading to change the order among any of the following criteria: oldest and newest or newest and oldest; A to Z or Z to A; and smallest to largest or largest to smallest.

You can also filter the results to view only certain categories. For example, click the down arrow for the Category column heading and change the filter to show spending only for restaurants or only for shopping.

Next, you can filter the results to show only transactions in a certain range. For example, click the down arrow for the Amount column heading, move to Number Filters, then select a criteria, such as Greater Than. Type a number to see only amounts greater than the number you entered. Click the down arrow for the column heading and choose Clear Filter to remove the filter.

Charts and Categories

Click the Snapshot tab to view charts and graphs showing your spending for the month compared to the previous month. To view a specific month, click the down arrow next to the month listed at the top and change it to a new month. You can also see where and how you spend your money for the month.

You can add your own custom categories to track specific transactions by clicking the Categories tab. Go to the Categories section and select the Custom option. Type the name of the category under the Category Name column and the type of category, such as Income or Expense, under the Category Type column.

Go to the Transactions sheet. Click the down arrow next to a transaction to which you want to apply one of the new custom categories and select that category from the list. While you’re here, you may also need to change the category for any transactions for which Excel picked the wrong category.

Update Data and Change Settings

If you ever want to add or change any information in the workbook, check out the right-hand pane. Click the Update button to update your spreadsheet with the latest transactions. New financial accounts can always be added by clicking the Accounts tab and selecting Add account or transaction.

Add supplementary templates to calculate net worth and recurring expenses under the Templates tab. The For You tab shows you the top merchant on which you spent money, and the Settings tab allows you to view and modify key settings.

Be sure to save your workbook with a specific name before you close it so you can open and update it each time you want to review your financial accounts, transactions, and spending patterns.