Creating a daily spend counter using Monzo, IFTTT and Google Sheets

A few weeks back I saw a tweet from Olivier Huntington linking to an easy-to-follow guide to build a budgeting widget using the newly released Monzo/IFTTT integration. I followed the guide, but quickly lost interest in the widget as it didn’t fill any unmet need I had.

I wanted a daily spend counter so did some clumsy hacking in Olivier’s original spreadsheet and worked out a simple way of collecting a given days spend:

=SUMIF(G2:G999, TODAY(), H2:H999)

1. Following Olivier’s original guide, insert this into the second sheet on the ‘main budget sheet’:

The sum is inserted in the J column above

2. Then use this cell rather than the B7 cell mentioned in Olivier’s guide (step 6), to populate your widget. I gave mine a heading to make it more prominent, and placed it on my daughters forehead to make it extra judgemental.

I’ve had it running a few weeks and have noticed shifts in behaviour. I’m buying less coffee after realised just how much it was costing each day, and keeping a more active eye on my balance.

Hope this is helpful. Big thanks to Olivier for the original guide, to Monzo for continuing to put our interesting things to play with, and Miles for helping with the Google Sheet code — essentially I did nothing but write this post :)