Meal Planner Spreadsheet: Grocery Budget Tracker (Excel, Google Sheets)

MEAL PLANNER & GROCERY BUDGET TRACKER — Excel and Google Sheets

Eleven linked tabs with four weeks already filled in: 28 recipes costed, 84 planned meals, 36 food purchases, 14 shopping trips and 23 things thrown in the bin. One week goes badly wrong. Nothing is blank, so you can watch every column behave before you touch it.

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THE IDEA THIS FILE IS BUILT ON
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Your food budget is not your shopping bill.

Almost everybody budgets the supermarket, then eats the supermarket PLUS the Friday delivery, the coffee on the way in, the sandwich bought because you left yours at home, and the Saturday pub lunch. Every one of those is food. None of them are on the receipt you were counting.

In the worked example the household spent $448.10 at the shops — and $739.90 on food. That is 65% more, on a $640 budget they thought they were comfortably under.

The shopping was never the problem. That is why the Food Spending tab has ten categories and only three of them are shopping.

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THE TEN TABS
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1. START HERE — what each tab does, the colour rules, the honest limits
2. SETUP — five things you type, then the whole picture underneath
3. RECIPES — 80 recipes with cost a serving, minutes, and whether it freezes well
4. MEAL PLAN — 4 weeks x 7 days x 4 meals. Pick a recipe, the cost arrives by itself
5. GROCERY LIST — 200 lines by aisle, what you thought it cost against the till
6. FOOD SPENDING — 300 lines. Every pound that bought food
7. WASTE — 100 lines of what went in the bin, what it cost, and why
8. SHOPPING TRIPS — 40 trips: planned against actual, plus items on no list
9. BY WEEK — budget, shopping, everything else, waste, meals missed
10. BY CATEGORY — ten kinds of spending and the honest split
11. PANTRY — 100 staples with what is running low

1,551 live formulas. Every summary reads itself from the tabs underneath.

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FOUR THINGS IT DOES THAT PRETTY PLANNERS DO NOT
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▸ COSTS EVERY MEAL. Cost a recipe once at the prices you actually pay; every time it lands on the plan the cost follows. Porridge is $0.60 a serving. Salmon night is $4.20. You cannot make that trade until you can see it.

▸ COUNTS THE TAKEAWAYS. Ten categories, from the big shop to the coffee on the way in. In the example, $291.80 went on food nobody cooked — 39% of the whole food bill.

▸ PRICES THE BIN. $34.15 thrown away in four weeks, across 23 separate occasions, and $20.55 of it could have been frozen on the night. That is about $267 a year sitting in a freezer drawer you already own.

▸ SHOWS THE WEEK IT WENT WRONG. Week 2 cost $233 on a $160 budget — and the shopping that week was the cheapest of the four. It was the two nights nobody cooked.

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WHAT YOU GET
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• Meal_Planner_Grocery_Budget_Tracker.xlsx — the workbook, worked example inside
• 00_START_HERE.pdf — a written guide: the order to fill it in, how to cost a recipe in five minutes, what a top-up trip really costs, and where numbers go wrong

Instant download. Nothing arrives by email, nothing to install.

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TWO COPIES IN THE DOWNLOAD
One workbook has the worked example filled in, so you can see what every column expects before you touch anything. The second is the same file completely blank — same tabs, same formulas, same charts — ready for your own numbers from the first row. Start on whichever suits you.


WORKS WITH
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• Microsoft Excel 2016 or newer, Windows or Mac
• Google Sheets — upload the file and open it with Sheets
• LibreOffice Calc — free, and everything works
• Any currency, any country. No macros, so there is nothing to enable.

Save it to Google Sheets and you can tick the grocery list off in the aisle from your phone.

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HONEST LIMITS — READ BEFORE BUYING
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✗ No nutrition, no calories, no macros. This is about money and waste. It will not tell you whether a meal is good for you, and nothing here is dietary advice.

✗ It does not know supermarket prices. Every price is one you type. Prices differ by shop, town and week, and anything claiming to know them would be wrong within a month.

✗ It will not write the plan for you. There is no generator and no shuffle. You pick the meals; the file costs them and tells you the truth about the total.

✗ The grocery list is not generated from the plan. That would need an ingredient list per recipe, which turns costing a recipe from a five-minute job into a chore. You write the list; the file checks it against the till.

✗ One household, one currency. No conversion, and no splitting between people beyond a Who column.

✗ Capacity: 80 recipes, 4 weeks of plan, 200 list lines, 300 spending lines, 100 waste lines, 40 trips, 100 pantry items.

All of this is in the file too, on the Start Here tab. It is here so you can decide before you pay rather than after.

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HOW I WORK
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I never ask for shop access. No password, no manager invite, no app permissions. You buy the file, you download it, that is the whole transaction.

Something wrong with the file? Message me through Etsy and I will fix it.

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LICENCE: for your own household. Reselling, sharing or redistributing the file is not allowed.

DIGITAL PRODUCT: because it downloads instantly, this item is not returnable. Everything the file does and does not do is written above and in the images, so you can decide before you buy.

Tags: meal planner spreadsheet, grocery budget tracker, weekly menu planner, food budget, recipe cost calculator, food waste tracker, excel meal plan, google sheets planner, family meal planning