Hisaab — The Guide

1. What this is

Hisaab is a mirror for your money. Not a budget — nobody here will tell you to stop buying chai.

You write money down as it moves: in, out, expected. The sheet turns those lines into answers to the only two questions that matter:

Do I have enough right now? Is enough coming in on time?

Most money stress — in a home or a business — is one of these two questions, unanswered. You do the writing. The sheet does the math, the remembering, and the warning.

2. Make it yours (five minutes, once)

1. Open the link you were sent. Google shows one button — Make a copy. Click it, and the sheet is yours, in your own Google Drive. Nothing you type ever leaves it.
2. On the Start Here tab, click the big Setup / Repair button (the Actions menu has the same thing). Google asks permission once, and asks narrowly: to work with this spreadsheet only, and to run when you're not watching — that second one is what makes repeating entries appear on their own. It cannot see anything else in your Drive. If a screen tells you the app isn't verified, that's Google's standard wording for any sheet carrying its own code; Advanced → Continue goes through it. Skipping this step is the one way to break Hisaab — the sheet looks perfect and quietly does nothing. You'll know it worked when the warning above the button turns into ✓ All set up!
3. Tell it what you have today. One row per place money sits: today's date, the amount as a plus, the account's name in To (bank/idfc, bank/kotak, cash), and Mode = Opening Balance. That label keeps it out of your income reports; the balance picks it up on its own.
4. Three settings, one tab: your income goal, your months to survive (how long you could run with nothing coming in — 6 is the least worth aiming at), and the month your financial year starts. That's all you're asked for; everything else the sheet works out from your own rows. Change them any time.

One sheet, for good — don't start a new file each April. That last setting is why: it slices the financial year inside this file, so your tax view is right without cutting your history in half. And history is where the good numbers live — your six-month average, months of cover, “up from 22% over the last 12 months”, a client who has grown from a fifth of your income to a third. Split the file and every one of those starts again from zero. Old accounting software taught everyone to close the books and open a new company; a sheet has no such need, and obeying the habit costs you the best of it.

3. Your first row

A money event is one line. Date, Amount, From, To — a description if you feel like it.

Two habits, and they are the whole skill:

The sign is the direction of your money. Minus — it left you. Plus — it came to you. The colour says it back: green in, red out.

From and To are the two ends of the movement, in your own words.

Why both? They answer different questions. From → To says who to whom. The sign says did my money grow or shrink — without you ever teaching the sheet which names are "you". Ravi hands you ₹5,000: ravi → cash, +5,000. You return it next week: cash → ravi, −5,000. Same two names, opposite signs, everything clear.

Use / when a name has family: bank/idfc, bank/kotak, hr/payroll, ops/purchase. Later, "bank" totals all of them and "bank/idfc" totals one. Detail costs nothing — use words you'd say aloud.

A name reads like a postal address — left to right, big to small.

india / maharashtra / nashik

Ask for india and you get everything in india. Ask for india/maharashtra and you narrow to that state. Ask for maharashtra on its own and this address doesn't answer — its front door is india. (Name something maharashtra/nashik and of course maharashtra totals it — it's the front door there.)

You always start at the front door. A word finds names that start with it, never names that merely contain it. So kitchen totals kitchen/gas and kitchen/oven. It does not total repairs/kitchen — that one's front door is repairs. It only mentions the kitchen.

Which means the first word decides what you can total. Pick it on purpose.

• kitchen/repairs → you can total everything kitchen
• repairs/kitchen → you can total all repairs, everywhere

Want both? Tag it — that's section 9.

Two levels is nearly always enough. Three is where people stop recording money and start building a filing system.

One rule that never bends: same thing, same spelling. "Acme" and "Acme Pvt Ltd" become two strangers, and every total splits between them. The dropdowns remember your words — pick from them, and the problem never starts.

Moving your own money? Bank to bank, bank to cash — that's not earning or spending, just your money changing pockets. It's one row: the amount as a minus, From the account it left, To the account it reached, and Purpose: Self. That last part is what stops the reports calling it income. Mode stays free for how it moved.

That's everything you must know. The sheet is fully working from here. Everything below is optional power, added when you want it.

4. Watch it react

Next to every row, Balance — your total money, across every account, as of that line. No bank shows you this number. Each shows its own slice; Hisaab shows the whole.

The Timeline tab is the same story laid flat: every movement, past and future, in date order, balance running alongside. Look, don't type — entries live in Log and Repeats; Timeline only shows.

Now the quiet trick: give a row a future date and read the balance beside it. That's your money on that day, if today's plans hold. Type a date, see your future — that is most of what "forecasting" means, and you already have it.

5. Money that repeats

Rent. Salaries. EMIs. Subscriptions. The retainer that arrives every month. Write each once, in Repeats — not twelve times a year in Log.

A rule reads like a sentence you'd say: −25,000 · bank → landlord · Monthly · Day 5. Plain dropdowns cover every pattern — Monthly, Weekly, Every 2 weeks, Yearly; on Day 5, Last day, Third Fri; both 1st and 15th if that's how a payment runs. End: leave it blank for "never", type a number for "that many times", a date for "stop then".

From that one line, the sheet writes every future occurrence into your timeline by itself. When a date passes, the row becomes real by itself — nothing to tick. One month was different — date slipped, paid by another mode? Edit that single row. Your edits are respected; the machine never overwrites a row you've touched.

Each rule also reports back:

Monthly bite

what it really costs per month. An ₹18,000 yearly insurance is ₹1,500 a month; seeing everything in ₹/month lets anything be compared with anything.

Paid / Remaining / Next date

for an EMI, a bar slowly filling. Payments left, amount left, end in sight.

Importance

Essential, Nice-to-have, Can drop. Set once. On a tight day, the sheet already knows what to cut first — and how much per month comes back.

And one number worth a long look: your recurring outflows added up for the year. "You owe ₹14L this year no matter what happens." People cancel subscriptions on that sentence alone.

6. Tomorrow, already visible

A row with a future date and a tick in Planned is a hope, not a fact. Planned rows never touch your balance — money isn't real until it lands — but they appear in the future view, dated, waiting. Two dates ride along: Planned on holds when it was due; Date holds when it actually happens. The gap between them is how the sheet learns who runs late.

Expecting ₹1L from a client in August? One planned row. Considering a ₹2L machine in October? One planned row. The months ahead redraw instantly. To try out any future, add a planned row and look. Delete it, and the future goes back. There is no separate "simulator" — the sheet is the simulator.

The tick has a second job. When two rows are linked (section 14), it marks which side is the ghost — and it's always exactly one side:

One thing, paid in pieces

a ₹5L machine, three payments. The plan is ticked; the payments are real.

One bill, many jobs

a ₹10,000 bill covering two jobs. The bill is real; the pieces are ticked.

The rule underneath is the one you already know: whatever isn't a payment of its own gets the tick. A plan hasn't been paid yet. A piece was paid as part of something bigger. Neither moved money by itself, so neither touches your balance — and the money counts exactly once. (Worked through in section 14.)

The Monthly Snapshot shows last month, this month, and the next twelve: in, out, net, balance, and a small bar per month. The bar's colour deepens as a month sinks toward your safety money — so your scariest month is visible long before it arrives, while there's still time to do something about it.

A word on order: this is a forecast, not a budget. A budget is what you intend; a forecast is what's coming. Most of us run on gut feel and surprises — so see what's coming first. Discipline (section 11) is easy to add once you can see.

7. The numbers that watch you

The Dashboard reduces everything to a row of answers:

In Hand

what you have — all accounts, one number, now

Inflow

what's coming — next 30 days, from Repeats. Hopes show on their own line beside it, never added in

Outflow

what's going — next 30 days, already booked

Breakeven

what you need — "You need ₹3.5L to cover the next 30 days"

Avg Expense

what a normal month costs you, from your own history

In vs Out

how you spend — "for every ₹1 you earn, you spend 93 paise"

Usable for Growth

unused money — what's left after your safety money is safe

Used to Grow

money put to work — how much of your spending built something

Three of these deserve a second look:

Breakeven counts your committed payments plus your own average of everyday spending — and it never counts money you're merely expecting. A cheque in the post pays no bills. It also teaches the honest shape of money: the next 30 days never stop coming. The question is never am I done? — it's can I keep running? That's not bleak; that's just the game, seen clearly. Months of cover — how long you could run with nothing coming in — is the calmest number in money.

Usable for Growth is your true "can I afford it?" — for the machine, the hire, the holiday. Not what's in the bank; what's left after the next months are safe. When it's negative it flips into a target, not a scolding: "You still have to earn ₹X to be safe."

Used to Grow shows the percentage and the rupees. "Only ₹2,876 went toward growth" stings precisely because it's true — and rises the moment you act on it.

And when a big payment lands, the sheet translates it into the only unit that matters: "₹5.2 L landed in the last month — that's 3.4 months of running costs covered." A lump becomes runway. This is the whole bind of project work in one sentence — costs arrive monthly, income arrives in lumps — and the line stays silent unless something notable actually turns up, which is what makes it feel like the sheet noticed rather than the sheet talking.

And one glance worth making a habit: both sides of your money move at a speed. Earning ₹X a month and rising, spending ₹Y and rising faster — that crossing is the single most dangerous pattern in a small business, and here it's visible months before it bites.

Below the numbers, the sheet speaks in sentences: "Things are steady — keep an eye on next month's numbers." When all is well, it says so. And where one payer dominates your steady income, it says what that means: "If the Techpark contract stops, your runway drops to X months." A consequence you can act on — not a statistic you have to interpret.

8. Who owes you

The moment a promised payment's date passes with no money landed, it appears on the Chase List: who, how much, days late — and once there's history, how late that payer usually runs. "Sharma runs about 12 days late" changes how you plan around Sharma.

No scores, no status ceremony. You already know in your gut who's slow — the list just refuses to let you forget. It sits at the top of Cash Flows because for a business it's the highest-paying report in the sheet: money already earned, not yet collected. Chasing it beats finding a new customer every single time.

When it lands, put the real date on that same row and untick Planned — the row becomes the fact, and the chase closes itself. The due date stays in Planned on, so the sheet remembers how late it ran. Paid in part? Log what came as its own row and shrink the planned one to what's still due — or link the parts to it instead and let the sheet keep score (section 14). Never coming? Delete it — and keep the lesson.

The chase sits at the top of the Cash Flows tab. Below it, the rest of your money's rhythm: who pays you and where it goes, side by side, top five each; every tag's in, out and net; and the full dated list of everything ahead — because timing is the whole point. It's rarely the month that hurts; it's the week when things collide.

9. Tags — words that count

Forget what "tags" means elsewhere. Here, a tag is a calculator you name.

Write sharma-reception on every row that belongs to that order — the advance (+), the ingredients (−), the event staff (−) — and sharma-reception adds itself up. No formula, no math. The sign decides add or subtract; the word decides where it counts.

Three columns describe every rupee, and each has exactly one job.

Folders locate it. Sticky notes cut across folders. The stamp is the only one that adds to 100% — that's section 12.

Every tag is a small business inside your business — its own money in, its own money out, its own answer. Name one for anything you want judged: a line of work (tiffins, events), a client, one big order, a channel (instagram), a bet (diwali-orders). A row can carry several words — festive boxes can be tiffins, packaging — and every word counts it. Three calculators running at once, no extra effort.

Really did spend ₹60 on one and ₹40 on the other? Write two rows. Then it's true instead of guessed.

Two rules keep the answers honest:

1. Tag both sides. The job's income and the job's costs. Tag only the income and every job looks brilliant.
2. Only tag money you can point at. Paneer that went into the Sharma reception — you can point at it, tag it. Rent? You can't point at where rent went; it runs the whole shop. Rent never gets a job's word. (What rent is, and where it's judged, is sections 12–13.)

Start with one kind of word — your lines of work. Add more kinds when the first ones prove useful. Five kinds of tags is real power; five kinds on day one is confusion.

10. Watchlist — pick a thing, see everything

Choose any name — a client, an account, a tag — and its row fills in: money in, money out, net, share, and a twelve-month trend line. Want a comparison? Add a second row. That's the entire feature.

"How is X actually doing?" — rent this year, chai this month, what Sharma is really worth to you — one row each, no report-building, no formulas.

For a job, one column earns a second look: Money life — Jun 26 → Aug 26 · 3 mths · 5 in · 9 out. When the money started, when it stopped, how long it ran, and how many payments went each way. Five milestones and nine supplier bills is a very different job from one and one.

It is deliberately money life, not project life. The sheet doesn't know when your project started — it knows when money moved, and those are not the same thing. That difference is exactly the point: a two-month job can be a five-month cash story. Advance in June, costs through July, the balance in October. Nothing else shows you that gap, and in project work the gap is what actually hurts. Leave the period blank and you see the whole life; set one and you see that window.

And here the slash pays off: because you named things staff/salary, staff/wages, the word staff alone totals every person you pay. Departments, teams, projects — you never design them. Your words already built them.

11. Limits & goals

Pick a For (any name or tag), an amount, a period — weekly, monthly, yearly, or rolling windows like "last 30 days". The sheet fills a bar and speaks plainly: Under · Warning · Over for limits, Behind · Almost there · Reached for goals. Green fills, amber warns at 80%, red is over — the colour is the alert; no popup needed.

Then the part a notebook can't do. Miss the same limit three periods in a row and the sheet stops nagging and starts advising:

"Over 3 in a row. ₹871 is more realistic."

— computed from your own history, leaning on your recent weeks. A budget you break every single month isn't a discipline problem — it's a wrong number. Fix the number; save the discipline for where it's real.

12. Purpose — what is this money for?

Every rupee that leaves is doing exactly one of five jobs:

Specific work

went into the work: materials, site labour, that job's transport. You can point at where it went.

Running cost

keeps the shop open: rent, salaries, internet, software. There whether you sold or not.

Investment

bought something that lasts: a machine, a laptop, gold.

Loan

borrowed money going back. And when a loan arrives, it's a plus with Purpose Loan — because borrowing is not income, however good the month suddenly looks.

Pocket

money moving between the business and you. Minus is you taking money home; plus is you rescuing a bad month. (Tracking only personal money? Everything is already your pocket — simply ignore this one.)

Stuck between the first two? One test settles it: would I still be paying this if I did zero work this month? Yes → Running cost. No → Specific work.

A cousin worth naming: GST you've collected is money in your account that was never yours — a short loan from the government. Mark it so, and filing day stops being a surprise.

Thirty seconds a day. Section 13 pays it back with the answer most owners have never seen in their lives.

13. Where the profit went

Every owner has lived this: "The year was profitable. So where is the money?" Your accountant answers next September, about last year, in a language you don't enjoy. This report answers today, in yours. It has three parts, and they read top to bottom.

Part one — what each line of work really earns.

A dosa sells for ₹50. Its batter cost ₹20. That dosa drops ₹30 into the shop's common pot. That's what a stream truly earns — its income minus the costs that went into that work — and the sheet computes it from your words alone:

The weddings get the congratulations. The boring daily tiffins pay the rent — two and a half times over. Now you know what to sell more of — and what to reprice. The rupees say which stream fed you; the percentage ranks them fairly, big orders and small alike.

Part two — the pot pays for the shop.

Every stream pours what it earns into one pot. Out of that pot — once, and only there — go the running costs, ranked biggest first:

The layout is the lesson: the shop's costs sit visibly attached to no stream. What survives the pot is profit — here, five thousand rupees. Barely breathing.

Here lives the rule that saves businesses: never split the rent across your streams to judge them. Do that, and a perfectly good stream can look like a loser. You kill it. The rent doesn't shrink — it lands on the survivors, who now look sick too. Judge every stream by what it drops in the pot: if it drops anything at all, killing it only makes the pot poorer. The only truly losing stream is one whose own work costs exceed its own income.

And when the pot isn't covering the shop, one division tells you which war to fight — total dropped ÷ running costs. Low because streams drop little? Pricing and mix — work on the streams. Low because running costs swelled? Overhead — the ranked list has already found the whales.

Part three — profit vs cash.

The pot said ₹5,000 left — and yet the bank went down by nearly two lakh. Three things eat cash without ever appearing as a cost, and your Purpose column has been quietly naming them all along:

Profit was real. The cash went there. Line by line, named. "You took ₹45,000 home this quarter — and put ₹30,000 back in a lean month" — most owners have never once seen that sentence about themselves. This is the page that shows it.

Two honesty notes, both automatic: if "rent" ever appears marked both Running cost and Specific work, the sheet flags the contradiction quietly at the bottom — one of them is wrong, by definition. Same for work costs carrying no tag — real work money landing on no stream means some stream is reporting less than it earned. (A word on a running cost, though, does no damage — contribution counts only Specific-work rows. The word just buys you a bonus view: rent by location, salaries by branch.) And judge an order over the order, not the month: a wedding's advance lands in May, the ingredient bills hit June, the balance comes in July — June alone looks like disaster, July like a miracle. The tag's lifetime total is the true number.

14. Linked payments

Two shapes a single row can't say. One column says both.

One thing, paid in pieces. A ₹5L machine paid ₹1L + ₹2L + ₹2L, whenever cash allowed. An invoice collected in three parts. A project billed by milestone, on no schedule anyone can predict. Enter the whole thing once as a planned row (the hope). Link each real payment to it as it happens. The sheet keeps score: paid ₹3L, ₹2L left — for money going out and money coming in alike.

One payment, many purposes. A ₹10,000 hardware bill — ₹6,000 into the kitchen job, ₹4,000 into the wardrobe. Shops hand you one bill for two jobs; this unbundles it. Easiest answer, and usually the right one: write two rows, tag each, done. Same totals, nothing new to learn.

Want one row that matches the ₹10,000 line on your bank statement? Keep the bill whole as one real row, then put the pieces beneath it — each piece points at the bill and gets Planned ticked, so the money is only spent once. Two pieces or five, split four ways among friends: every piece points at the same bill. Pieces never point at each other, so nothing gets harder as they multiply.

The same Planned tick from section 6 tells the two shapes apart, so you never have to remember which: in paid in pieces the parent is ticked (it hasn't happened yet); in many purposes the pieces are ticked (the money already left, once). Exactly one side of a link is ever ticked — that is the whole mechanic.

Never put a share or a percentage inside a tag. A tag counts its row in full, always. Half-and-half is two rows — never half a word.

Rule of thumb: link only when the money is not new — when a payment pays down something already written. Everyday rows: no link, leave it blank. EMIs don't need it either — Repeats already counts paid and remaining on its own.

15. When life happens

Skipped a week? A month? One rough line — −40,000 · bank → misc · "catching up June" — and you're current. Approximate beats absent. A rough sheet still answers the two questions; an abandoned one answers nothing. There are no streaks here, no guilt. The sheet waits.

Doubt the numbers? Run the bank check: type today's actual bank balance, and the sheet shows the gap. Sheet says ₹4.2L · Bank says ₹4.45L · off by ₹25,000. That gap is the missing story — a bounced EMI, a forgotten sale, a typo — one number that catches every kind of error at once.

And the bounced-EMI case has a two-second fix: the sheet marked it done, but the money never left — re-tick Planned (section 6) and move its date forward. It goes back to "coming," and the balance corrects itself.

And relax about small wrongness. The decisions this sheet powers are rankings — kitchen over wardrobe, cut this before that — and ₹2L versus ₹40k survives a few mislabelled rows. You'll feel a wrong number long before any audit would find it. You are the audit.

16. Small habits that keep it clean

Same word, every time

Pick from the dropdowns; never re-type a name from memory.

Tag both sides

Income-only tags look brilliant; cost-only tags look dying. A number that looks too good is usually missing rows — the too-good number is the alarm.

Clear the untagged-income line

now and then — income that lands as an untagged lump makes every stream look like it's starving.

Type only in Log and Repeats

Timeline and the generated tabs are views — they show, you don't touch.

A number looks wrong?

In order: bank check → hunt missing rows → check spellings. It's one of the three.

17. Questions people ask

18. Where to next

Two companions, both for once you've been using this a while.

Little things you can already do — everything the sheet already does that nobody tells you about: naming tricks, date shortcuts, and the Google Sheets features you already own and never use.

Money that grows — what you own and what you owe, in these same four columns. Investments, debt, and the one number that tells you where you actually stand.