This is a single, real project, not a list of unrelated tips — an expense tracker built by chaining together three tricks already covered on this site, in the order you’d actually use them.
What we’re building
A simple monthly expense tracker: paste in raw transactions from a bank statement, clean them up automatically, and end with a running summary and a quick visual of where the money’s going — without touching a single manual formula for the cleanup part.
Step 1: Paste the raw data
Start with a column of messy transaction descriptions exactly as a bank export gives them — things like AMAZON MKTPLACE PMTS AMZN.CO or TESCO STORES 2921 LONDON GB. Don’t clean anything yet.
Step 2: Clean it up with Flash Fill
In the column next to it, type what you actually want that description to read as — Amazon, Tesco — for the first two or three rows. Excel’s Flash Fill picks up the pattern and finishes the rest of the column automatically. What would have been an hour of manual retyping becomes a few seconds of typing examples.
Step 3: Add a category with a simple formula
Add a category column, and use a straightforward IF or VLOOKUP against a small lookup table of merchant → category pairs sitting off to the side. This is a good moment to use a named range for that lookup table — =VLOOKUP(B2, MerchantCategories, 2, FALSE) reads far more clearly than a wall of cell references.
Step 4: Summarize it with a PivotTable
Select the cleaned-up table and use Recommended PivotTables to get an instant total spent per category, per month — no manual SUMIF formulas required.
Step 5: Make the totals scannable at a glance
Apply data bars to the category totals so the biggest spending categories are visually obvious without reading a single number.
The result
A tracker where pasting in next month’s raw bank export, retyping two or three cleaned-up examples for Flash Fill, and refreshing the PivotTable is the entire monthly maintenance — a few minutes instead of an evening of manual cleanup.
Download the template: