If you know what you are doing and have a little patience in setting up and testing formulas, much can be automated in spreadsheets.  In fact, mine could use a little more automation to cut down some of my time at each month end. 

I haven't released any financial spreadsheets to anyone at this point for various reasons.  But I hope to make some generic templates available in the near future.

To answer your questions, I have a spreadsheet for each month and then I transfer the category totals for that month into another spreadsheet that provides me with a running year-to-date total for the year by category and overall.  I currently do the transfer manually, but it can be automated if I would just take the time to set up my monthly spreadsheets properly and do the formulas.

My monthly spreadsheets include entries for every transaction for every day of the month.  My columns are "Date", "Description" (Payee and/or nature of the expense), "Expense Type" (Categories using "validation" to create a drop-down list), "Amount", and "Payment Type" (Cash, Check, or Debit Card).

Instead of the "Expense Type" being in a single column with a drop-down list of categories, all of the categories could have their own column.  That makes the monthly spreadsheet a lot bigger for viewing and data input, but it makes it easier for totaling categories and transferring those totals automatically to a summary spreadsheet.

I like to keep the data input as simple and compact as possible, so that I don't dread doing it any more than necessary.  However, the downside to that is I have to do more manual work at the end of the month.  You have me thinking I probably should take some time and revamp my process.    

Yes, you can do a workbook where each month is a spreadsheet and then the monthly totals automatically transfer to an annual total spreadsheet.  As long as each monthly spreadsheet is laid out exactly the same, it's a fairly easy formula and the "Help" files explain how to do it.

Hope that helps a little.

I suspect you didn't notice that this thread is nearly 1 year old (easy to do!)

Go to Howard's home page and click "financial information".  You will see the downloads that Howard has made available.  I just recently began using them and they are great.

Happy Accounting!