How to Create Excel Spreadsheets for Home Office Deductions

Keeping up with home-office deductions can be frustrating. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to determine how much you’ve paid each month. With Excel spreadsheets, you can quickly open your files and see how much you’ve paid. Creating Excel spreadsheets for your home-office deductions also makes it easier to prove how much you’ve spent, should you ever be audited. Best of all, this process is easy and can be completed in a short amount of time.

Instructions

1. Create a title. A title makes it easy to identify your spreadsheets once you’ve printed them out. It’s best to keep the title short and simple. For example, you might have a title such as “Electric Bill for (Year)”. If you like, you can even add color to the title and increase the font size to make your spreadsheets more appealing.

2. Label columns with appropriate descriptions. The second row of your Excel spreadsheets is the best place to create labels for your columns. Depending on the type of bill, you may have such labels as "Pay Date" and "Amount Paid." You might also want to include labels such as "Due Date" and "Check Number." These additional columns make the auditing process even easier.

3. List a pay date for each month. Under the "Pay Date" column, take the time to enter the number of pay dates you will have in one year. For example, an electric bill would have 12 payments. Just enter the date the bill is usually due. You can always change the information once you know the exact date. This creates a place marker so future steps are easier to complete.

4. Use the sum function to total future entries and avoid having to change the total manually each month. After the last row of your spreadsheet, enter the sum function under the "Amount Paid" column. For example, if you have 12 pay dates and four columns, the sum function would be in cell D15 and would look like this: =SUM(D3:D14).

5. Enter information. After you’ve created your Excel spreadsheets, you can start entering the information you already have for each expense. This may take a bit of time, but after you’re done, it will be a piece of cake to enter future information on home-office deductions.

Tips & Warnings

• Once you’ve determined how many columns you will have, merge that many cells in your title, and center it to make the document visually appealing.