🏦 Personal Cash Flow
New to Notion for finances? Here is how to get started with a personal cash flow, or in other words, finding an automated total balance form income and expenses. This dashboard contains three separate databases, two of which, Income and Expenses connect to a Total Balance calculator.
the Anatomy Of The Dashboard
There are three databases nested inside toggles, all of which are tables:
Income
Expenses
Total Balance
Note: tables can change colors via changing the color of the toggle it is in. More about this trick here.
Click to expand
The Income Database
There are twelve database views in this database that represent each month of the year.
An “Amount” number property can be configured to your desired currency type by navigating to “123” located inside a cell.
The “Type” property is a dropdown menu with two selections, Fixed and Extra income. Fixed income is recurring income like a paycheck.
The Expenses Database
There are twelve database views in this database that represent each month of the year.
An “Amount” number property can be configured to your desired currency type by navigating “123” located inside a cell.
The “Type” property is a dropdown menu with two selections, Fixed and Flexible expenses. Fixed expenses represent recurring expenses like rent payments.
A “Budget” number property is also available to determine the budget of flexible expenses like groceries and entertainment.
The Total Balance Calculator
This database is used to collect all information from Income and Expenses via a relation property
Two rollup properties show the Total Income and Total Expenses from both databases.
A “Starting Balance” number property in addition to total income and total expenses will combine to calculate a “Balance”.
The “Balance” formula looks like this:
prop("Starting Balance") + prop("Total Income") - prop("Total Expenses")
The Cash Flow Template In Action
You’ll notice that with each entry added to the Income and Expenses databases, the Balance Calculator database updates a balance automatically.
If you’re using Notion for finance, my advice is to keep it simple. Remember that Notion databases are not spreadsheets. And so, they do not have many advantages of a spreadsheet like advanced formula configurations.