Holiday Meal Budget Planner

A holiday meal doesn’t blow its budget in one place — it leaks across twenty ingredients. This planner costs the meal the way the money actually leaves: ingredient by ingredient, dish by dish, course by course — for ANY big meal, not just one holiday.

HOW IT WORKS
Name the event, set the date, the guest count and your budget cap on Start Here. On Menu & Dish Costs, write the ingredient lines under each dish — the dish totals, course totals and the meal total build themselves from the lines, so changing one price moves everything it touches. Flag each line with YOUR buy timing — Buy Ahead or Fresh — Last Days — and the sheet totals the two piles into a shopping split. Then Prep Timeline & Leftovers sequences the work and, afterwards, values what came back to the fridge: the true-cost line subtracts the leftovers from what you spent.

WHAT’S INSIDE
– Menu & Dish Costs: 21 ingredient lines building 11 dishes and 6 courses — the sample Thanksgiving for 12 totals $237.45 against a $220 cap: OVER BUDGET by $17.45, printed plainly
– Cost per guest $19.79, and the biggest dish named: Roast turkey — $65.30 of the meal
– The shopping split by your own flags: Buy Ahead $172.35 vs Fresh — Last Days $65.10
– Prep Timeline: 6 sequenced tasks, 330 minutes of work (5h 30m), from “3 days before” to “just before serving”
– The Leftovers Log and the true cost: $11.30 of leftovers logged, true cost $226.15 — STILL OVER BUDGET by $6.15, net $18.85 a guest. The sheet does not let the leftovers pretend the meal was fine
– Expense Log + zero-based Monthly Budget ($390 across 8 holiday categories), Dashboard and Monthly Summary

The buy-timing flags are your own calls, made from your own storage and shopping plans — the sheet totals the piles, it doesn’t give food advice. Generic by design: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Eid, a wedding rehearsal, any meal big enough to need a plan.

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.