The best Excel templates to organise everything

Chaos has taken over your life. You confuse your child’s class schedule with the deliveries schedule. You take your child to the pediatrician only to find out that the appointment was with your dentist. Your desk is covered in post-its of various sizes and cluttered with reminders for scheduled activities you don’t remember organising.

Your organisation is failing you and you need to regain control of your professional and personal life. Make use of the technology that is available to you; to get you started we will introduce you to the most useful Excel templates designed for managing everything.

Templates for business management

• Financial statements – There are templates to create your Profit & Loss Account, your Balance Sheet and your Cash Flow Statement for you. Don’t waste time on writing your own financial statements, just plug in the numbers and you are done!
  You can also get Excel to give you an annual financial report or a net worth summary of your company.
• Keeping track of your debt – There are two templates to help you with staying on top of what you owe: The Mortgage Loan Calculator gives you a clear picture of what it takes to pay off your mortgage within a certain time span, and the Credit Card Payoff Calculator lets you see what it would cost you to pay off your credit cards. It is able to take into account different interest rates and different amounts of debt from different credit cards.
• Recording your expenses – Excel has two templates to aid you with this – one for general expenses and one for tax expenses. There is also one for creating an expense budget and one which creates data bars and bar charts to visualise your budget.
• HR templates – Make use of these templates to track employee attendance and overtime worked, to help with payroll and to speed up your employee scheduling.
• Invoicing – There are different invoice templates in different styles available which can be found here. There is also an invoice tracker available to monitor your accounts receivables.
• Inventory management – This template is very useful as it allows you to track items in stock, stock reorder levels, reorder times and reorder quantities.
• Project management – Excel offers you two great project management templates: One to create a four week task timeline and another to set milestones for your upcoming projects.
• Event planning – You have multiple templates available to help with such things as event schedules and meeting agendas. The meeting agenda template automatically adjusts duration times when other items are added or changed allowing for last-minute updates to your agenda.
• Tracking sales – There are three templates available to help you organise your sales successes: An online sales tracker for smaller scale sales, a sales report that includes space for product descriptions and customer names, and a quarterly sales report that visualises your sales in an easy-to-understand pie chart.
• Business travel expenses – The business travel expense log lets you evaluate your travel costs and sort them into categories such as meals, transportation and lodging. It gives you a quick reference summary when required. You can also make use of Excel’s business trip checklist as it is or customise it by adding your own items.

Templates to organise your personal life

• Daily schedule – Keep up with your and your family’s appointments and scheduled activities by adding them to your weekly schedule template.
• To-do list – Include this simple tool in your daily life to remember all the things that need doing. You can set different priorities, notes and levels of completion.
• Family budget – Stay atop of your family’s monthly expenses. Slicers allow you to filter categories of expenses and your budget is presented in handy diagrams.
• Weekly meal planner – Plan your meals of the week in advance with this template. Knowing your meals in advance will allow you to go shopping for the week once rather than going back to the store multiple times a week.
• Event budgeting – Use this template to plan bigger personal events as well as company events. It lets you compare your budget against your actual costs in several categories.
• Exercise planner – Make planning and keeping track of your fitness progress easier for yourself by using Excel’s exercise planner.
• Trip organiser – Organise your itinerary, travel plans and trip budget with this template before and during your next trip.
• Family travel itinerary – This is a template designed for families, it lets you compile various aspects of your trip ranging from packing to emergency contacts and blood types.
• Chore schedule – Assign family members or flatmates tasks for the week. If you are using the online version, people can tick their tasks off the list once they have completed them.
• Class schedule – Keep track of when your kids need picking up from school and when to nudge them about that assignment due next week.