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Free Freelance Income and Expense Tracker (Spreadsheet)

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Checked by TNT Review — 5 October 2026. The spreadsheet’s totals formulas were verified by independently recalculating the same figures in a separate script and confirming they match. Not opened in a live spreadsheet application as part of this check. See Verification.

The problem

Freelance income usually arrives in irregular amounts from several sources, with expenses scattered across different tools and subscriptions. Without tracking both in one place, you don’t actually know what you made this month until tax time forces you to reconstruct it — by which point receipts are scattered or gone.

Expected outcome

By the end of this guide you will have a simple spreadsheet that totals your income, expenses and net profit automatically as you add rows.

Requirements and costs

  • Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice Calc.
  • Cost: free.

Step-by-step implementation

  1. Download the tracker from the link below.
  2. Add a row per transaction, with Type set to exactly “Income” or “Expense” — the totals rely on matching this text exactly.
  3. Enter expenses as negative numbers (e.g. -55, not 55), so Net adds correctly without a separate subtraction formula.
  4. Check Total income, Total expenses and Net at the bottom — they recalculate automatically.
  5. Extend the formula ranges once you add more rows than the template starts with (the Read Me sheet explains exactly how).

A real example

Four rows: two income entries (A$450, A$300) and two expenses (A$55, A$13, entered as negative):

Total income:   A$750
Total expenses: -A$68
Net:             A$682

Verification and troubleshooting

What we actually checked: the spreadsheet’s three SUMIF-based totals formulas were independently recalculated in a separate script using the same 4 example rows, and matched exactly (income 750, expenses -68, net 682). This confirms the formula logic is correct; it was not opened and tested inside a live spreadsheet application as part of this check.

Troubleshooting:

  • Total income or expenses shows 0 when it shouldn’t. Check the Type column is spelled exactly “Income” or “Expense” (capitalization and exact text matter for SUMIF) — “income” or “Incomes” won’t match.
  • New rows don’t get included in the totals. The formulas only cover the original range; extend SUMIF(B2:B5,...) to cover your actual last row once you’ve added more.
  • Net looks wrong. Double-check every expense is entered as a negative number — a positive expense will add to income instead of subtracting from it.

Free vs. paid

This is free and complete for tracking income and expenses by hand. Paid bookkeeping tools add bank-feed imports, invoicing, and tax-category reports — useful once your volume makes manual entry itself the bottleneck.

What to do next

Set aside ten minutes at the same time each week to add that week’s transactions, rather than trying to reconstruct a month of receipts from memory later — the habit matters more than any feature of the spreadsheet itself.

Free resources

The download is the full tracker, with a Read Me sheet explaining each part.

Download the income and expense tracker (ZIP, 7 KB)

Is there a paid version?

Not yet. This is the complete method. TNT Review has sold nothing to date and has no checkout, so any price we discuss in future should be read as a hypothesis, not an offer.

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