How I Plan, Track & Organize My Finances In Notion

As a product creator, I love creating micro tools to improve my personal and work productivity.

This quarter, I’m focused on improving how I track money and manage personal finances.

Today, I’ll explain how I use Notion as my Finance Mastery System and share some cool features I’ve created in my Notion template (available on my personal website) to organize my finances better.

The Problem

I often scrambled through Google Sheets, Dropbox, and Apple Notes to gather all the data I needed about my expenses, income, statements, etc.

Everything was all over the place across different digital tools. It was a chaotic mess and gave me a huge headache:

• While I tracked some expenses in Google Sheets, I constantly had to learn new formulas whenever I needed to analyze my finances in detail.

• I often forget to set up reminders and hate forgetting to cancel unwanted subscriptions, especially those that require credit cards for free trials.

• My receipts were stored haphazardly — some digitally in Dropbox, others downloaded to my desktop folder — and I struggled to identify which ones were tax-deductible.

• I had to manually generate financial reports using my spreadsheet tracker to assess my overall financial health.

  
  

  
  

The Solution

I needed a better personal finance system that wouldn’t require me to sign up for multiple software or services.

While I appreciated the custom formulas in Google Sheets or Excel, Notion allows me to do much more, including:

• creating beautiful design layouts
• syncing databases
• customizing formulas
• automating calculations

Ideally, this Notion finance system should help me handle everyday financial management, like:

• Calculating a monthly budget and showing available budget for different spending categories.
• Tracking expenses, income sources, transfers in one place.
• Tracking upcoming subscription bills and their due dates.
• Monitoring my investments to track gains and losses.
• Monitoring debt balances and payment schedules.
• An accessible finance dashboard that displays financial summaries.

1. Multi-step budgeting

This budget tracker helps me allocate how much I want to save, invest, spend, and pay off each month.

I can break it down further by budgeting for subcategories. For example, out of my 25% spending budget on Needs, I can allocate 5% to Transportation and 10% to Utilities.

My budget tracker can also displays a red progress bar if I exceed the budget, and a green one if I am under budget.

2. Automated financial reports

I can easily review my total income, expenses, and cash flow each month.

My financial reports also display progress bars to show how well I’m doing financially month by month.

Searchability is also important for managing my finances.

Therefore, I’ve created custom filters in Notion to help me easily trace back financial progress from previous months and years.

3. Tracking expenses and incomes

• Income Tracker: Whenever I record an income transaction, I categorize the income sources — whether it’s freelance work, online business, rental income or dividends.

  
  

• Expense Tracker: This tracker organizes all my expense records by category and subcategory, helping me identify where I can cut back and save money effectively.

  
  

• Receipt Tracker: Each time I add an expense transaction, I can upload a PDF receipt or link to an external URL containing the file, and indicate whether it’s tax deductible.

4. Monitoring subscriptions

I made a Notion tracker to keep track of all of my personal and business subscriptions like Netflix, hosting providers, design software, etc.

It automatically counts down to the next billing date and indicates the number of days until my payment.

I can also pin upcoming reminders on my Notion dashboard to highlight payments due within the next 30 or 60 days.

5. Investment tracker

For the investment tracker, I use it to monitor all my investments in one place.

This system allows me to categorize investment assets such as stocks, cryptocurrencies, index funds, mutual funds, and real estate.

I can easily update the current market value, and it will automatically calculate the percentage of gains and losses across all investment assets.

6. Real-time account balance tracker

I also created an Account Manager to monitor all my bank accounts and track transfer activities between account A and account B.

After each transfer, such as from Savings to Investment Banks, the balances in my Account Manager update automatically in real-time.

This means I always have the most accurate and up-to-date information about my assets at my fingertips without having to manually recalculate everything.

This account balance tracker also integrates with the net worth calculation database.

For example, whenever bank balances change, my Notion gallery will automatically update my total assets, liabilities, and net worth.

7. Loan tracker & debt reduction progress

I created a loan tracker to manage my mortgages and auto loans. I can categorize them based on interest rates, allowing me to prioritize payments and save money on interest over time.

One of the key features I added is an auto-countdown, which shows exactly when and how much more I need to pay off my debts. This feature is incredibly motivating because I can watch the days and amounts decrease in real-time as I make payments.

It helps me stay focused on reducing my debt and achieving financial freedom faster.

8. Financial goal tracker

Setting and achieving financial goals is essential for mastering personal finances.

I can set up my annual financial targets, such as how much I want to earn, save, invest, and pay off each year.

The tracker will automatically calculate how much I am currently achieving my goals, and a progress bar will show how close I am to reaching my financial targets.

Preview Full Notion Finance Template Features

Visit my HackerNoon Bio for more information - https://hackernoon.com/u/whizzoe