What, When, and How Much: Budget, Cashflow, and End Balance

Over the years some have suggested we change our basic spreadsheet design to automatically transfer  data from the Cashflow, left side to corresponding locations on the Budget, right side, or vice versa.
That way we would need to enter data only once, not twice as is currently required.

Those well-meaning suggestions are appreciated, and it would work.  But it would also defeat the whole purpose of having the two sides:  to provide a cross-check of each other and produce an End Balance at the bottom of each that exactly matches the other to the penny, though each arrives at that end balance by different means.

The Budget side is the "What" side of our budget sheet because it itemizes and totals income, expenses, and charges by category, and its information appears in the same locations throughout the year.  It also categorizes "What Kind of" Income or Expense by grouping items into blocks of Regulat Income and Other Income, Regular Expenses, Other Expenses, and Charged Expenses.

Because data on the Budget side remains in the same positions, specific items are quick for the eye to locate in any given month.

The Cashflow side is the "When" side of our budget sheet because it itemizes and totals income and expenses by chronology, and its information appears in shifting locations throughout the year depending on how many income or expense items cluster around different dates.  It distributes its 29 to 31 days per month vertically among 56 available rows, and its items add or subtract from the running balance in column D to produce its End Balance in cell D61 for January, which must agree with the Budget Side End Balance in cell J61 for January exactly before moving on.

So it should be apparent that automatically transferring items from the two sides one to the other in order to save double entry time would defeat the purpose of having the two sides completely.  Their End Balances would agree each month, but they would be wrong!  Whatever mistakes were made on either side would automatically be transferred to the other side as well.

What we designed in our Pagemonth Budgets, then, is what some call double-entry bookkeeping, in which independent sides exist to confirm each other.  We believe it to be a better form of home budgeting than others.