Small Business

Small Business Income and Expenses Spreadsheet: Build a Free One in 10 Minutes

A small business income and expenses spreadsheet needs three tabs — Income, Expenses and a Summary — with five columns on income, six on expenses, and about eight formulas. You can build it free in Google Sheets in roughly ten minutes, and this page gives you the exact column spec and the formulas to paste in. Below that: a worked quarter with real figures, the expense categories that line up with a self-employed tax return, and an honest account of what a paid template adds over the free build.

This page is the file. If what you want is the ongoing process — reconciling against your bank, closing each month, keeping books for clients — that lives in bookkeeping in Google Sheets. Build the sheet here first; it is the thing the process runs on.

Build it in 10 minutes

1. New Google Sheet. Rename the first tab Income, add two more: Expenses and Summary.
2. Paste the headers into row 1 of each tab (they are in the tables below — the column letters matter, because every formula on this page refers to them).
3. Freeze row 1 on both logs: View → Freeze → 1 row. Ten seconds, and you never lose track of which column you are in on a long log.
4. Add the category dropdown. Put your category list in Summary column A, then on Expenses select column E → Data → Data validation → drop-down from a range → Summary!A5:A16. This is the single most valuable ten seconds in the build.
5. Format the money columns as currency (select column D on both logs → Format → Number → Currency) and the date columns as dates. A column that is secretly text will not sum, and that failure is silent.
6. Paste the Summary formulas from the block below.
7. Enter one real row on each log and check the Summary moves. Never trust a sheet you have not seen respond.

The exact column spec

Income tab

Expenses tab

The formulas, ready to paste

On the Summary tab. Put your category names down column A starting at A5.

Two of those repay attention. C5 turns raw totals into shares — "vehicle is 11% of spending" is a decision, "$380" is a number. And B20 is a self-audit: any figure above zero means rows are missing a category and your breakdown is quietly incomplete.

Use whole-column references (D:D) so rows added later are picked up automatically, and lock them with dollar signs before dragging anything.

What it looks like filled in: one quarter

A freelance designer's first quarter. Income logged as it arrives: January $4,200, February $5,600, March $3,900 → $13,700.

The sheet earns its keep in three observations you cannot get from a bank balance. Equipment is 29.5% of the quarter's costs but it is a one-off — next quarter's margin will look better, and knowing that stops you from over-reacting to a single bad-looking month. Card fees are $400, which is more than marketing; logging income gross and fees as their own category is what makes that visible. And self-employment tax on $10,679 of profit is 10,679 × 0.9235 × 0.153 = $1,508.89 — about 14% of profit, before income tax. Run your own figure through the self-employed tax calculator.

Categories that match your tax return

Two of the most common searches that reach this page are from self-employed people, and for them the category list is not arbitrary — it is a translation layer. Name categories after the lines you will actually file on, and year-end becomes a copy job rather than a reconstruction:

Keep travel and meals apart even though it feels tidier to merge them, and keep equipment purchases distinguishable from supplies — those two distinctions are the ones that matter at filing time. Our expense categories guide goes deeper, and the deductions checklist covers what actually qualifies. None of this is tax advice — rules vary by country and situation, and your accountant is the one who signs off.

Free, honestly

Since "free" is what most people searching for this actually want, here is the straight version:

• Building it yourself from this page costs nothing and takes about ten minutes. The column spec and every formula above are the complete build — there is nothing withheld.
• The free calculators on this site do the one-off maths without any sheet at all: profit margin, break-even, and the self-employed tax calculator.
• What a paid template adds is the parts that are fiddly rather than difficult: a formatted dashboard with charts, the dropdowns and validation already wired, protected formula cells so you cannot paste over them, and a phone-friendly logging view. If your time is worth more than the build, that is the trade. If it is not, build it free — the sheet you make yourself works just as well.

When you have outgrown this sheet

This structure holds up to a few hundred transactions a year. Past that, or once you add payroll, inventory or accrual accounting, the honest answer is accounting software — the reasoning is laid out in spreadsheet vs accounting software. Before that point, the thing that improves your numbers is not a bigger tool, it is the monthly routine: reconcile against the bank, fix categories, move the tax money. That routine is the subject of the bookkeeping guide, and it is what turns this spreadsheet from a record into a set of books.

Related: bookkeeping in Google Sheets · profit and loss statement · tracking expenses for taxes · how much to set aside for taxes

This guide is part of our complete system for running your small business finances in Google Sheets.

Quick FAQ

How do I make an income and expenses spreadsheet?

Create three tabs — Income, Expenses and Summary. Give Income five columns (date, client, description, amount, method) and Expenses six (date, vendor, description, amount, category, receipt). On Summary, use =SUM() for the two totals, subtract for profit, and =SUMIF() against a category list for the breakdown. Set the category column to a dropdown so entries stay consistent. That is the whole build, and it takes about ten minutes.

Is there a free small business income and expense spreadsheet?

Yes — the one you build from the spec on this page, in Google Sheets, at no cost. Every column and formula needed is above. A paid template saves you the formatting and wiring, not the capability; the free build produces the same numbers.

What columns should an income and expense spreadsheet have?

Income: date received, client, description, amount, payment method. Expenses: date paid, vendor, description, amount, category, receipt link. The two that people leave out and later wish they had are method — without it you cannot reconcile against a bank statement — and receipt link, which is the difference between a claim you can support and one you cannot.

What spreadsheet should a self-employed person use for income and expenses?

The same three-tab structure, with categories named after the lines on the tax form you file. That one choice turns year-end from a translation exercise into a copy exercise, and it costs nothing to do at setup — while renaming categories across a year of entries afterwards is genuinely annoying.

Should I track income when invoiced or when paid?

When paid, on cash basis, which is what most small businesses use. Log money on the day it arrives. Unpaid invoices belong in a separate tracker — mixing them into the income log inflates your revenue and your tax estimate with money you have not received.

Is a spreadsheet enough for small business accounting?

For a solo or micro business without payroll, inventory or accrual accounting, yes. It stops being enough when any of those three appear, or when transaction volume makes manual entry the bottleneck. Until then the limiting factor is whether the sheet is current, not how powerful it is.

How do I get a monthly breakdown instead of a running total?

Swap SUMIF for SUMIFS with a date range, using the first day of the month as a header and EOMONTH for the last. Fill it across twelve columns and you have a monthly profit and loss grid that updates itself — the full pattern is in the bookkeeping guide.