Hi, and welcome back. Now we're going to talk about the Dashboard tab. This actually is my favorite tab because you can actually see all of that hard work in one single snapshot. One single view, lets you know whether or not you've exceeded your budget or whether or not you were under budget. Okay, so here is how the dashboard works. So first of all, you have to decide which month you want to review.

So in this case, we're looking at February. If you decide that you want to review January then you have to go back to the Summary tab, and you have to change the month from February to January. Okay. Now once you change the month from February to January, then in the Dashboard tab, you will notice that all of the information has now changed to January budgets and expenses. So don't forget In order for you to actually view the month, you want to view you have to go to the Summary tab and pick the month that you want. And then the month that you want is then going to display on the Dashboard tab.

Now, here's how the Dashboard tab works. So here's how you would read the Dashboard tab. So essentially, what we want to know is did we exceed our overall budget? Or where we write our budget, or did we were we under budget? So this tap onto that question. It asked you the question, did I exceed my overall budget?

The answer here is going to be either yes or no. In this case for the month of January, Susan did not exceed her overall budget. Now how is the overall budget calculated? The overall budget is calculated by netting your income and your expenses when you net your interest. Coming your expenses, it's going to tell you over here how much you saved. If this is a positive number, then of course it's going to be black.

If it is a negative number, it's going to show as a negative number, meaning that you are definitely off off budget in the month that you're looking at. Now, the way this is calculated is it takes your income and it takes your expenses and it gives you the net. Now your income may or may not have been under or over budget. Same thing with your expenses. It may or may not have been under or over budget. But in order for you to know whether or not you were over under budget, within your with your expenses or with your with your income and your expenses, you'd have to go to the summary see the summary sheets to make that determination because as you can see for the month of January Susan was actually under budget in terms of how much money she brought in, she anticipated she was going to bring in 7700. in all actuality, she only brought in 7600, meaning that she was $100 short.

However, for expenses, she'd budgeted $404,446 whereas, but she actually spent $3,766, meaning that she understands by $680. She made less income. She only made 76 rather than 77, which means there is 100 on a deficit. And as you can see in the dashboard, it shows that her savings altogether was 586. So basically, the $100 was subtracted from $680 and that netted. What has overall savings for the month was.

So even though on the dashboard, it tells you whether or not you exceeded your budget, you always want to make sure that if the answer is no, that you still go to the Summary tab and take a look to make sure that you were either within budget, or you were over budget when it comes to your income or under budget when it comes to your expenses. Because looking at the broad No, doesn't really tell you if you had a deficit, looking at the summary sheet, lets you know that you did have a deficit. So yes, it's a good thing that you did not exceed your budget. However, you did have a deficit. So you want to make sure that you can cure that. That way, in the following months, you can avoid what you did in the month that caused you to have a deficit.

So with that said, the dashboard screen and the summary screen, or should I say the dashboard worksheets and the summary worksheet, work hand in hand. So you don't you don't want to look at them in isolation, you definitely want to compare what's on the summary sheet with the final answer on the dashboard worksheet. So that is how the dashboard that's how the dashboard screen works. It pretty much lets you know whether or not you were over or under and then you can use the information to make intelligent and to make actual decisions that make sense because usually all these numbers are swirling around in our heads and we make assumptions we think that we may have not made enough money or not made what we what we should have made or we spent a lot of money and expenses. We overspend. And then we went over went over money go, because you know how much money you make every month.

But for some reason you're always broke. You're wondering why am I always broke? Why do I never have enough money to cover my bills, I make enough money. But for some reason I can't seem to cover my bills, what I'm making well, looking at the spreadsheets and looking at your expenses, that in and of itself will really help you revisit your spending habits. Now, one of the things that I like about this, this screen is that you can actually see what percentage you spent on any given expense, or what percentage your income is break was broken up into. So over here, you can see that you can see that the net pay is 59% of the total income that Susan brought in.

You can see that rental income is 16% of total income brought in and hit income is 26% of total income brought in. So if you have more than one stream of income, so you have several streams of streams of income, you can actually see just by looking at this chart, or rather looking at this pie charts, which income stream is the most profitable, and then you can also use that information to make further decisions for the future. Same thing would be here with your expenses. Where did my money go? Where was my money spent? Well, 48% was spent on housing, which isn't bad, I mean, 48%, meaning that half of it, almost half of the expenses was spent on housing, then you can see that 12% of that was spent on savings for an investment.

You want to look at what the least amount was spent on. And in this case, it was personal care, at 1%. And then also let's see, this the personal care at 1%. And then enter payments for entertainment shows zero percent, meaning that the amount spent was quite miniscule. But if you remember, she spent $15. This shows you the value of $15.

And it shows that Entertainment $15 was spent. However, it's really tally at tallying it up as zero percent, because in the larger scheme of things, that amount is quite miniscule. And if you scroll further down, you'll see a little chart here which shows projected versus actual expenses. Now, what this chart shows you is, it shows you by looking at a line graph, how you did that month. So the yellow is what you actually spent and then the pink line are your projected amounts. So it shows that say for transportation, you actually spent way less than you projected.

So whenever the yellow box is below the pink line. That means that you actually spent less than what was projected. And also, if you look down here, you can also see the dollar amount that you spent. So it shows actual for housing. your actual spend was $1,809. And your projected amount was $1,959.

And let's see, let's go over here to food. It shows that you actually exceeded what you projected because the yellow bar is above the pink line. So that shows that you exceeded what you actually projected. And if you look at the numbers, it shows that your actual spend was $295. But your projected, what you projected to spend was $225. So that's why I like this particular page because you can look, you can just look at the chart and look also at the line graph, if you want to just see really quickly how you did in any given month.

Okay, so hopefully you use this page in the way that it was intended and you can really get some good information just by analyzing the pie chart and also analyzing the line graph.