Homeschool Planner Spreadsheet for Excel and Google Sheets

By the middle of October the paperwork has usually split into four places. The curriculum receipts are in an email folder. The hours are on a legal pad, mostly. The grades are in a notebook, or in your head. And the budget — the number you set in June, when the plan was still clean — is a figure nobody has looked at since the second Rainbow Resource order.

None of that is a planning problem. It is a record problem, and it only becomes visible at the two moments when the record has to produce a number: when a state form or a portfolio review asks how many days and hours you did, and when you sit down in May and try to work out where $1,400 went.

A homeschool planner spreadsheet is worth building for exactly that reason. Not because a spreadsheet plans a better week than you do — it doesn’t — but because it is the only format that will still hold a defensible total in April for something you logged in September.

This page walks a full worked year: two children, real curriculum prices, a real hours count, and the arithmetic that catches a 198-hour shortfall while there is still time to fix it.

The Four Jobs, and Why They Fail Separately

Most free homeschool templates do one of these. The trouble is that they fail independently, so doing one well does not protect you on the other three.

Money. What you bought, what it cost, which child it was for, and whether that is still inside the budget you set. This fails quietly and cumulatively — no single purchase is the problem.

Hours and days. A running count against your own state’s requirement. This fails invisibly and then all at once, because a small weekly gap is undetectable and a large annual gap is unfixable.

Progress. Scores, dates, assignments, subjects covered. This fails at review time, when the question is not whether the child learned it but whether you can show the work.

The plan. The weekly schedule, the co-op day, the field trips. This is the only one of the four that fails loudly, which is precisely why it is the only one most people track.

A planner that covers the plan and nothing else leaves the three silent failures running.

The Worked Year

Two children: Grade 5 and Grade 2. School year running mid-August to late May, 36 teaching weeks. The state figures used throughout this page are 180 days and 900 hours — those are the numbers this example family recorded on their own state requirements page, not a national standard, and yours may be different or may not exist at all. Put your own in before you use any of the arithmetic below.

Here is everything that was bought.

Then the things that are not curriculum but are still the homeschool budget:

That is $697.97 per child — but only if you divide it the lazy way, and dividing it the lazy way is how families with three children convince themselves the third one is free. The real split is in the multi-child breakdown, where the $255.53 of genuinely shared material gets allocated and the two children come out at $436.22 and $369.71 respectively.

The useful thing about the table above is not the total. It is that the total is built from rows you were keeping anyway. If the purchase list has a cost column and a purchased flag, the budget summary is a SUMIF away, and you never have to “do the budget” as a separate task again:

Spent to date   =SUMIF(Purchases[Purchased?], "Yes", Purchases[Cost])
Remaining       =Budget_Total - Spent_to_date
% of budget     =IF(Budget_Total>0, Spent_to_date/Budget_Total, 0)

Set the budget in five or six categories before you shop, not after. A budget set afterwards is called a total.

The Hours Arithmetic Nobody Does Until April

This is the part of the year that goes wrong, and it goes wrong in a way that is completely invisible week by week.

A normal week in the worked family, in hours of logged instruction:

Nineteen and a half hours. That is a full, real, unremarkable homeschool week — nobody skipped anything, the co-op day counted, and the children worked.

Now run it out. Thirty-six weeks at 19.5 hours is 702 hours. Against a 900-hour target that is a 198-hour shortfall, and the weekly gap that produced it was 5.5 hours: 900 ÷ 36 = 25 hours a week needed, 19.5 logged.

Five and a half hours a week is not something you notice. Nobody’s week feels 22% short.

What matters enormously is when you find out:

• Found in week 6. 117 hours logged, 783 left, 30 weeks to do them in — 26.1 hours a week. That is a 6.6-hour adjustment. Add forty minutes a day, or count the reading and the field trips you were already doing but never logging, and it is solved.
• Found in week 30. 585 hours logged, 315 left, 6 weeks to do them in — 52.5 hours a week. That is not an adjustment. That is a year you cannot fix.

The entire value of an hours log is the difference between those two rows, and it costs you one weekly total and one subtraction. The full attendance and hours walkthrough has the log structure, the formulas and the four things people forget to count.

The Decision That Sets the Budget

By the time you are logging purchases, the spending is already decided. The money is actually committed at a desk in June, comparing two or three options per subject — and almost everybody makes that comparison on price and a review score, which are the two least predictive numbers available.

The worked family’s math shortlist:

Option B is $83 cheaper and needs no prep. Option A is the most expensive on the row and was the one chosen — because at 25 minutes of prep per lesson, four lessons a week, 36 weeks, Option C quietly costs 60 hours of your year, and because the Option A manipulatives carried down to the Grade 2 child while an online licence would have had to be bought twice. Neither of those numbers appears on the price tag.

Working out the three numbers that actually decide it — cost after reuse, parent hours, and cost per completed lesson — is a twenty-minute job that sets the largest line in the budget.

The Record That Has to Survive Being Read by Someone Else

There is a difference between records that help you teach and records that satisfy a third party. The second kind has requirements the first does not: dates, scores out of a stated maximum, subjects named the way your state names them, and nothing reconstructed after the fact.

Three columns turn a grade notebook into that second kind of record:

Grade %     =IF(AND(Score<>"", Max<>"", Max>0), Score/Max, "")
Subject     (a dropdown, so "Lang Arts" and "Language Arts" never split your totals)
Date        (typed the day it happened, which is the only part that requires discipline)

The dropdown matters more than it looks. Two spellings of one subject is the single most common reason a year-end subject total comes out wrong, and it is invisible until the SUMIF returns a number that is too small.

Keep the same discipline on field trips — date, location, subjects covered, cost — and they stop being a memory and start being both a budget line and a defensible record of instruction. The worked family’s six trips were $230 and, at four to five hours each, a meaningful contribution to the hours count.

Setting It Up

The minimum structure that covers all four jobs, as tabs:

1. Dashboard — school year dates, state figures, children, budget summary, hours summary. The only tab you look at most weeks.
2. Purchases — subject, item, publisher, format, cost, purchased, which child. Every money figure elsewhere sums this.
3. Cost comparison — the options you considered per subject, kept, because next year’s version of this decision starts here.
4. Weekly schedule — per child, in half-hour blocks.
5. Attendance and hours — one row per day, hours split by subject, day total calculated.
6. Grades — assignment, type, date, score, max, percentage.
7. Field trips and extras — date, location, subjects, cost.
8. State requirements — your own state’s notification deadline, required subjects, minimum days, minimum hours, assessment and record-keeping rules, in one place.
9. Year review — budgeted against actual by category.

Build it in whichever of Excel or Google Sheets you already live in. If you avoid macros, add-ons and array formulas, the file calculates identically in both and you keep the option open.

The one rule that makes all of it work: log on the day. Every failure described on this page is a reconstruction failure, not a record-keeping failure. Three minutes on Friday afternoon beats three hours in May, and unlike the three hours in May, it produces numbers you can actually stand behind.

Related Reading

• How much does it cost to homeschool one child per year — the $1,395.93 above, itemised, with the costs first-year families miss.
• How to track homeschool attendance hours and days for your state — the log, the formulas, and what counts as instruction.
• How to compare homeschool curriculum options before you buy — cost after reuse, parent hours, cost per lesson.
• Homeschool planner for multiple kids in different grades — shared cost allocation and one schedule that holds two grades.

Featured on ReadySheetGo

Homeschool Curriculum Planner & Budget — $14.99

Every structure on this page, already built and already calculating. The Dashboard holds your year dates, your own state’s days and hours, your children by age and grade, a five-category budget summary returning spent, remaining and percentage used, and an attendance summary returning days completed, days remaining, hours logged, hours remaining and your attendance rate — which is the week-6-versus-week-30 arithmetic above, running continuously without you doing it.

The Curriculum Shopping tab is 50 rows of subject, curriculum, publisher, format, cost, purchased and child — and it is what the spent figure sums, so the budget maintains itself from the list you were keeping anyway. Cost Comparison puts two or three options per subject side by side on price, format, grade range, teaching style, prep time and your rating. The Attendance Tracker is 200 day rows splitting hours across Math, Language Arts, Science, History and two subjects you name, totalling each day and filling in the weekday from the date. Grade Tracker returns a percentage from score and max. State Requirements is where your notification deadline, required subjects, minimum days, minimum hours and assessment rules live instead of in a browser tab you will lose. Year Review sets budgeted against actual by category and tells you what you were over or under.

Plus a Weekly Schedule in half-hour blocks, a Resource Library with logins and ratings, and Field Trips & Extras with subjects covered, cost and permission status.

Eleven tabs, 541 formulas, and a worked sample family — two children, a full shopping list, a term of logged hours — already loaded so you can see it running before you type anything. Every state figure is an input you fill in yourself, never a number baked into the file. Works in Excel and Google Sheets. No macros, no add-ons.

Get the Homeschool Curriculum Planner & Budget →