Most freelance expense trackers fail in the same way. Not by being wrong — by being too elaborate to maintain through a busy month, abandoned in week six, and rediscovered in January as a half-finished artefact that is worse than nothing because it looks complete.
The version that survives is smaller than you think.
Six columns
| Column | Why it survives the cut |
|---|---|
| Date | Everything sorts and filters by it |
| Merchant | What the document says |
| Amount | The number |
| Category | From a locked dropdown, mapped to your tax form |
| Purpose or client | The thing you will not remember |
| Receipt link | The evidence, attached to the row |
That is it. No budget column, no monthly target, no running comparison against last year. Those are reporting features, and reporting is something you can add in an afternoon once six months of clean data exists. Adding them first is how the tracker becomes a chore.
The two columns people omit are category and purpose, and they are the two that make the data usable. Category is only reliable if it comes from a dropdown — use Data → Data validation pointing at a list on a second tab, built from the lines of the return you actually file. Free-typed categories drift within weeks, and a SUMIF over "Software" silently ignores every row tagged "software " with a trailing space.
Two formulas
On a summary tab:
=SUMIFS(Amount, Date, ">="&DATE(2026,1,1), Date, "<="&DATE(2026,12,31), Category, A2)
Category totals for the year, one row per category. This is the number you hand your accountant.
=COUNTIF(Category,"")
Uncategorised rows. This should be zero every Friday, and it is the only maintenance metric worth watching.
Anything more sophisticated can wait. A pivot table on date against category gives you a monthly trend in four clicks whenever you actually want one, which for most freelancers is twice a year.
One habit
Capture on the day, and clear the uncategorised count once a week.
The daily part matters because the purpose field decays fast. A week-old coffee is "client meeting with Dana — scoping the retainer". A four-month-old coffee is £4.20 of something.
The weekly part matters because ten minutes on Friday is sustainable and three hours in January is not. Set a recurring reminder; treat the uncategorised count hitting zero as the definition of done.
This is the part a scanning tool genuinely helps with, because the failure point is almost never the discipline — it is the typing. Scan2Sheet photographs the receipt, pulls out merchant, date, amount, and tax, assigns a category, and drops the row into your sheet with the image linked, which reduces the daily action to taking a picture and adding a few words of purpose.
What to add later, if ever
After six months of clean data, three additions earn their place:
- A client column, if you rebill costs. It turns the sheet into an invoicing input.
- A quarterly tax set-aside calculation, which is a formula over your income tab rather than a tracking change.
- A flag column for anything you want your accountant to look at, which converts year-end guesswork into a short list.
Notice all three are things you will want because of the data, not before it exists. That ordering is the whole method.
Build the six columns this week and resist adding a seventh until the first six have been maintained for a month.