If you freelance in India — writing code, design, writing, or running a small gig-based hustle — you already know the annoying part isn't the work. It's tracking the money: who paid you, who still owes you, how much GST to add on an invoice, and how much to set aside before the taxman comes knocking.
I looked around for a simple tool to solve this and kept running into the same problem: most finance templates are either generic (built for a US audience, no GST anywhere in sight) or locked inside Notion, which means you're stuck online and inside someone else's ecosystem.
So I built a plain Excel/Google Sheets version instead.
What it actually does
It's a single workbook with 6 connected sheets:
Dashboard — live view of this month's income, expenses, pending payments, and estimated tax to set aside
Income — log every payment, auto-calculates GST (18%) when applicable
Expenses — separate business vs. personal spend, flag what's tax-deductible
Clients — a lightweight CRM that auto-pulls total billed and last payment date from your Income sheet
Invoices — GST-ready invoice log with auto totals
Tax Estimator — auto-detects the current Indian financial year (1 Apr – 31 Mar) and estimates what to set aside, no manual date-range updates needed
Everything is formula-driven — no macros, no plugins, just SUMIFS/MAXIFS doing the work. It works fully offline in Excel, and also opens fine in Google Sheets or LibreOffice.
Why Excel instead of Notion
Notion templates are great if you're already living in Notion. But a lot of freelancers — especially non-tech folks doing gig work — just want to open a file and type numbers into it. No account, no sync issues, no "block" learning curve. Excel/Sheets has zero onboarding cost for most people.
Who this is for
Freelance developers/designers/writers juggling multiple clients
Gig-platform workers (delivery, content, etc.) with irregular income
Anyone who's ever been surprised by an advance-tax deadline
Try it
I put it up on Gumroad along with a written user guide: [link here]
Happy to answer questions in the comments, or take feature requests — thinking about adding a recurring-invoice reminder next.
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