Your budget balances for the month. Your paycheck on the 12th still doesn’t.
Rent hits the 1st. The car payment hits the 7th. Insurance hits the 25th. A monthly budget averages all of that out and tells you everything is fine — right up until two big bills land on the same paycheck and you’re covering groceries on a credit card.
This spreadsheet does the one thing a monthly budget can’t: it assigns every bill to the specific paycheck that has to pay it, and shows you which paychecks come up short — weeks before they do.
What you actually see
| Payday | Take-home | Bills due | Left to spend | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fri, Aug 14 | $1,800 | $540 | $1,038 | OK |
| Fri, Aug 28 | $1,800 | $1,835 | −$257 | SHORT |
| Fri, Sep 11 | $1,800 | $1,617 | $61 | TIGHT |
| Fri, Sep 25 | $1,800 | $430 | $1,248 | OK |
Every payday for the next year, calculated from your real pay dates and real due dates. The red row is the whole point — you find it in August, not on the 28th.
Try it free, right here
This is the core of the spreadsheet, running in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is saved. Enter your pay schedule and your bills, and see which of your next six paychecks come up short.
| Bill | Amount | Due day |
|---|
Sample bills are pre-filled — type over them with your own.
Secure checkout by Stripe. Download page opens right after payment and the link is on your emailed receipt.
What’s inside
- Paycheck Planner — one row per payday for the next 52 paychecks. Bills due, sinking funds, safety buffer, and the real number you have left to spend. Short paychecks turn red automatically.
- Bills tab — 40 rows for every recurring bill. Enter the amount and the day it’s due; the planner works out which paycheck catches it, including bills that straddle a month boundary.
- Sinking Funds — car registration, Christmas, insurance, the vet. Enter a target and a date, and it divides it by the number of paychecks you actually have left, then pulls that from every check.
- Dashboard — monthly bill load, annual take-home, average left per paycheck, a count of short paychecks, and which months give you a third paycheck for your real pay dates.
- Spending Log — optional 200-row log that auto-tags each purchase to the paycheck period it came out of, so you can see where a tight check actually leaked.
- Quick Start PDF — five-minute setup, plus the three ways to fix a short paycheck in the order that actually works (moving a due date is free, and usually fixes the whole year).
Works with your pay schedule
Pick one on the Setup tab and every date in the workbook rebuilds itself: weekly, biweekly (every other Friday), semi-monthly (15th & last day), or monthly. Biweekly folks: the Dashboard tells you which two months carry a third paycheck this year.
Questions
Do I need Excel?
No. It’s an .xlsx, so it opens in Excel, Numbers and LibreOffice — and for Google Sheets it’s File › Import › Upload › Replace spreadsheet. All the formulas carry over. The Quick Start covers it.
Is this another thing I have to maintain?
Ninety seconds on payday. Confirm the take-home matched, tick off what was paid, glance at the next two rows. Everything else is formulas.
My income is irregular.
Then edit the take-home cell per row — each paycheck has its own, so you can enter what you were actually paid. Set the planning figure to your lowest recent month, and treat anything above it as a windfall. There’s a free guide on that here.
What do I get, exactly?
One .xlsx workbook (7 tabs) and one PDF quick-start guide, plus a .zip with both. Immediate download — no account, no email list, no subscription.
Personal-use licence. Yours to modify for your own household.
Free calculators, if you want to try the method first
- Budget-by-paycheck calculator — split bills across your next two paydays
- Three-paycheck months in 2026
- Emergency fund target calculator
- 50/30/20 calculator