Budget planner sheet

The budget sheet is a ruled form rather than a list. Its heading reads Budget planner, month, 8 rows, and it is drawn on A4, 595.28 points across and 841.89 points down. At the setting the page opens on, the drawing lays down nineteen rules and seven printed words, and there are no tick boxes anywhere on it. The file comes to 2,229 bytes.

The columns

The form is arranged as a category column at the left and three money columns to the right of it, headed Planned, Actual and Difference. A total row runs across the foot. The category column is left empty by the drawing, and so is every cell in the three money columns and every cell in the total row.

The Difference column is a column and nothing more. The sheet does not compute it, does not indicate which way round the subtraction should go, and does not shade or mark any value as good or bad. What goes in it is the reader’s own arithmetic, in the reader’s own hand.

The sheet prints no figures

This is worth saying plainly, because a great many budget forms do the opposite. Every number that appears on this sheet once it has been used will have been written on it by hand. There are no example amounts, no pre-filled categories, no suggested proportions, no target line, no thresholds, and no commentary of any kind about money, saving, borrowing or spending. Nothing here recommends a course of action, and nothing here is advice. The sheet is ruled paper with column headings and a total row, and the whole of its content arrives from whoever picks up the pen.

the sheet carries twelve printed categories and between none and eight blank rows beneath them, and the period at the head can be set to Week or Month, which is what the weekly and monthly forms differ by

Black only

The form prints in black. Colour is a particularly poor idea on a money form, because the usual convention is to mark one class of figure red and another black, and that convention is destroyed the moment the sheet meets a mono printer: the red comes out grey, or it comes out black, and either way it says nothing. Every distinction on this sheet is made with rule weight, spacing and the position of the headings, all of which print anywhere and photocopy without loss.

Where the file is made

No template is hosted for this form and no part of it is licensed from anyone. The geometry was written for this site and runs in the browser: the controls set the number of rows and the shape of the form, the drawing redraws as they move, and the PDF is written out byte by byte on the reader’s own machine. What appears in the preview and what appears in the downloaded file are one and the same drawing.

A fresh copy costs nothing, which suits a form of this kind. One sheet covers one month, and next month wants a clean one rather than a rubbed-out one. The other stock on the site, twenty-five sheets in all, is drawn by the same engine on the same paper.