Farmers Market Budget Tracker

A farmers market habit needs two things a generic budget app never gives you: a per-trip cap you can break honestly, and a price book that remembers what eggs cost last month. This tracker is both — every buy logged with its unit price, every trip totalled against your cap, and a price book that flags the staple that keeps getting dearer.

The sample season runs 3 trips. Trip 1 lands at $41.25, comfortably under the $60 cap. Trip 2 comes home at $66.80 — OVER CAP by $6.80, printed plainly (the cheese and the whole chicken did it). Trip 3 settles at $46.90. And the price book catches the season’s quiet story: eggs rise from $6.50 to $7.00 to $7.50 a dozen across the three trips and are flagged RISING by $1.00, while honey holds steady at $12.00 a jar.

HOW IT WORKS
– ‘Market Day Log’: date, trip number, market and stall in your own words, item, qty + unit, price paid. The unit price is worked out on every row, and the trip totals at the bottom print UNDER CAP or OVER CAP against the cap you set on Start Here.
– ‘Price Book & Planner’ Part 1: for each staple — the best (lowest) unit price you have seen, how many times you have seen it, the stall and date of the best price, and the price trip by trip with a RISING / STEADY / DOWN trend flag.
– Part 2: the next-trip planner. Type the list and quantities; the sheet costs it at your best-known prices and prints the verdict against your cap before you go. The last column is your preserve/use plan, in your own words — what YOU plan to do with each buy. The sheet never tells you how to store or keep food.

WHAT’S INSIDE
– Market Day Log with unit prices on every row and plainly printed trip verdicts (sample season total $154.95 over 3 trips)
– A price book with best price, stall and date per staple — eggs flagged RISING, up $1.00 a dozen across the season
– A next-trip planner costed at best-known prices (sample plan: $56.50 against the $60 cap — UNDER by $3.50)
– Plus the standard Expense Log, zero-based Monthly Budget, Dashboard and Monthly Summary tabs

The plan fits the cap even while eggs rise, because it is costed at the best prices you have actually seen, not the latest ones.

How it works: the seven tabs are Start Here (your settings + step-by-step), the two feature tabs, Expense Log, Monthly Budget (zero-based), Dashboard and Monthly Summary. Yellow cells are the only places you type — every yellow value is your own entry. Formula cells are locked (password: sheetdaily, disclosed on the Start Here tab) and every formula is error-wrapped, so an untouched sheet reads blank instead of showing error codes. Instant download, ready for Excel and Google Sheets.

A note on the sample data: every price and date in this workbook is example data, typed in by hand to show you how the sheet behaves. Replace it with your own.