As part of the rebranding from “Office 365” to “Microsoft 365,” Microsoft unveiled a bunch of new improvements coming to the service, including Money in Excel, which is now available for subscribers in the United States.
Money in Excel is a template that works in combination with a plugin to help you take control of your finances. When using Excel with a Microsoft 365 subscription, you can now connect to your bank account to import transactions, and balances, and create alerts for fees and spending.
If you have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription, you can use this link to download the template.
After downloading the file, open the template with Excel and follow the on-screen directions to connect your bank using a secure third-party plugin supported by Plaid.
Once your account has been verified, the Excel sheet will update with your latest transaction history from all your bank accounts, something that if you did manually will take a lot of time and steps.
Then the next time you want to update the sheet, you only need to click the Update button without any additional steps. Also, you can use the Snapshot option to get an instant glimpse of your spending across various categories such as groceries, household items, rent, and more. If a specific transaction does not fall within an existing category, you can always create custom categories.
The available graph is simple, so you can quickly track how your spending compares month over month.
In addition, to keep you in the loop, Money in Excel will alert you about increases in your subscription fees, changes in bank and overdraft charges, or any significant purchases that were posted during a specific month.