DIY Filofax BillTracker Inserts with LaTeX

So easy to format your own...

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If you could not find suitable blank refills for your planner, you can DIY them using MS Word. Or LaTeX. See here the example how to create Bill Tracker Filofax insert in A5 size with LaTeX system.

The result I’ve got - a nice set of bill tracker pages for A5 planner.

First page which has Annual Bills and Cost Centres Totals

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and 2nd and 3rd pages having Quarterly and Monthly bills for half a year each.

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In Australia the fiscal year starts on 1st July, so for me it was convenient to have

  • left page here - second half of one calendar year
  • right page - first half of the next calendar year.

I can see whole fiscal year at once and not jump from page to page if I need to pay attention only to half of the year.

Next I will describe which options I tried and what first section looked like in LaTeX.

The PDFs available for download are described in the end of this post.

The BillTracker requirements

I wanted to have some combination of expense and bill tracker

  • to see which bill was paid and which was outstanding
  • to be able to quickly sum up to have a yearly total
  • to be able to aggregate further by cost centres - like services, car, business related etc

Options

There was the Finance page from Collins Debden planner… Good design, but to have one page per supplier - overkill

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And a free insert pdf from some Studio l2e… Monthly. Would need to prefill in the beginning of each month.

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The version I liked the most was this from some youtube video…

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It allowed

  • overview 12 services and see which monthly bill was paid and which was outstanding
  • easily sum up by supplier - to have annual total.

But

  • still many labels. We have word Jan there 12 times! and Feb too. You see where I go, usefull place used not in the most proper way.
  • no quarterly or annual bills.

Using LaTex for Planner Inserts

LaTeX is the computer language used to format books and scientific articles. It’s not very complicated. You can Install LaTeX and try it yourselves.

In this post I will show just a simple example with annual bills - to keep it short. See below is a bit of LaTeX code:

\section*{1. Bill Tracker}
\noindent\hrulefill

\subsection*{ Annual Bills}

\begin{NiceTabular*}{\linewidth}{@{\extracolsep{\fill}}
|p{0.7cm}||p{0.5cm}|p{0.4\textwidth}||p{2cm}|p{2cm}|p{2cm}|  }
\hline
CC & N & Payee & Due & Amt & Paid on\\
 \hline \hline
& 1 & & & & \\ \hline
& 2 & & & & \\ \hline
& 3 & & & & \\ \hline
& 4 & & & & \\ \hline
& 5 & & & & \\ \hline
& 6 & & & & \\ \hline
& 7 & & & & \\ \hline
& 8 & & & & \\ \hline
\end{NiceTabular*}

Here we have

  • page header section “1. Bill Tracker”
  • then horizontal line “\hrulefill”
  • a table name “Annual Bills”
  • and a table “\begin{NiceTabular*}…” see there are column widths in cm’s.
  • table cells are separated with &. And most of them are empty…

when we compile this LaTeX code into PDF, it looks like a nice table ready for Annual bills to go into:

Annual bills section

That’s a beauty isn’t it?

Bill Tracker PDFs for A4/A5 planners

Here are pdfs - with

You can download and print them for your own use for free. The license is “Creative Commons - Noncommercial - No Deriviatives 4.0.

For my A5 planner I am printing a booklet version with 2 pages per sheet, with 2 side printing.

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