As you know, one great benefit of the Google Suite is the fact that all tools can be connected in one way or another.

Two tools which intuitively make sense that they are connected are Google Spreadsheets and Google Forms. If you get many responses in your form, you will want to visualize them and potentially make some calculations. So having form responses immediately added to a Google Spreadsheet is very useful.

The way to connect a form to a spreadsheet is very simple. In your forms click on “Responses”, and then click on the three dots. By clicking on “Select response destination”, you guessed it, you can select a response destination.

 

One great use case is expenditure tracking. There are a lot of expense tracking tools out there, all of which work well. However, if you are looking for a free and customizable option, the Forms/Sheets combo is something worth considering.

I personally have a quite high threshold when it comes to expenditure tracking. I have tried and failed to establish an expenditure tracking habit many times. If tracking an expense becomes too cumbersome, I tell myself “I’ll just do it later in one go” and then forget.

If you have had a similar experience, read on.

Since you can customize the form to your liking, you can make the threshold very low to add in a new expense.

In my case, I only ever ask for three things:

• Item purchased (free text field)
• Cost (free text field)
• Category – e.g. Travel, Groceries, Entertainment (multiple choice field)

So I am not overwhelmed by the amount of detail I have to go in. I can complete the response within 25 seconds.

And finally the ultimate hack to round off expenditure tracking with Google Forms: adding a shortcut to your mobile home screen.

I had no idea this was a thing. What kept me trying to use other expenditure tracking tools was the fact that they had mobile apps. There just is no way that after a long day at the office I would remember to sit down in the evening and try to remember all the things I bought during the day.

However, it is possible to add link shortcuts to your home screen on your phone – both Android and iOS. Take a look at this tutorial on how to do that.

I have my Google Forms shortcut on my phone and can therefore immediately enter the information of a purchase right after I leave the register. The shortcut is actually much faster than the slow-loading apps of the professional solutions. You no longer need ten clicks and two minutes for a single form response.

I hope this was useful to you! As always: feel free to forward this email to anyone that might benefit from the information. And if you have further improvements or know of other hacks for personal & business growth, reach out to me!