Agent skill

Budget Tracker Design

by mohitagw15856 in mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills

Design a budget-vs-actuals tracker that stays alive past February — the category grain that matches real statements, the variance view that answers 'are we okay', the update ritual small enough to…

MITAuto-check passedDocuments & Office

Install Budget Tracker Design

skills CLI
$ npx skills add mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills --skill budget-tracker-design -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills budget-tracker-design --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/skills/budget-tracker-design .claude/skills/budget-tracker-design && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
budget-tracker-design
GitHub stars
1.4k
Token cost
~1.3k tokens
SKILL.md length
662 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
1,348
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

Design a budget-vs-actuals tracker that stays alive past February — the category grain that matches real statements, the variance view that answers 'are we okay', the update ritual small enough to…

  • Works in 5 steps: Grain follows the statement: categories… → The dual read is the view: this-month… → Accrue the irregulars: every lumpy… → …
  • Asked build me a budget spreadsheet
  • SKILL.md covers What This Skill Produces, Required Inputs, Framework: The Design Rules and Output Format, plus 7 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Budget Tracker Design is an agent skill from mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills. Design a budget-vs-actuals tracker that stays alive past February — the category grain that matches real statements, the variance view that answers 'are we okay', the update ritual small enough to survive, and the honest handling of irregular expenses. Use when asked build me a budget spreadsheet, track team spend against budget, why do we always blow the budget invisibly, or design a household/project budget tracker. Produces the tracker structure, the variance logic, the irregulars ledger, and the monthly…

Its SKILL.md is about 1.3k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. It is a single SKILL.md file with no bundled scripts.

It sits in Documents & Office, covering Excel spreadsheets. The repository describes itself as: 1255 professional Agent Skills for Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor & Codex — PRDs, postmortems, leases, medical bills, layoffs, go-bags, new countries. Plain markdown, MIT, in… The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Asked build me a budget spreadsheet
  • Track team spend against budget
  • Why do we always blow the budget invisibly
  • Design a household/project budget tracker

Example prompts

  • “are we okay”
  • “/budget-tracker-design”

Workflow steps

5 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. Grain follows the statement: categories are what spending arrives labeled as — if the card statement says "Software," a tracker with nine…
  2. The dual read is the view: this-month variance (the early warning) AND year-to-date variance (the truth) — monthly noise means YTD is…
  3. Accrue the irregulars: every lumpy expense becomes a monthly twelfth in its category (the insurance is $60/month that bills annually)…
  4. Thresholds mean something: the variance signal fires at a level worth attention (±10% or a real amount, scaled to the category) — a…
  5. The ritual is the moat: monthly, 15 minutes, from statements: fill actuals (statement-grain makes this transcription, not judgment), scan…

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 1cbf1f0. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Budget Tracker Design loads about 1.3k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 139 tokens; SKILL.md has 662 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~139
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.3k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills at commit 1cbf1f0, republished under its MIT licence (© mohitagw15856). 662 words, ~1,310 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/budget-tracker-design/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
budget-tracker-design
description
Design a budget-vs-actuals tracker that stays alive past February — the category grain that matches real statements, the variance view that answers 'are we okay', the update ritual small enough to survive, and the honest handling of irregular expenses. Use when asked build me a budget spreadsheet, track team spend against budget, why do we always blow the budget invisibly, or design a household/project budget tracker. Produces the tracker structure, the variance logic, the irregulars ledger, and the monthly fifteen-minute ritual.

Budget Tracker Design Skill

Budget trackers die two deaths: too granular (forty categories nobody can code a coffee receipt into — abandoned by February) or too vague (three buckets that hide every overrun until it's structural). The living tracker matches its grain to how spending actually arrives (statement lines, invoices), answers one question at a glance — "are we okay, and where not?" — handles irregular expenses honestly (the annual insurance bill is not a "shock"), and costs fifteen minutes a month, because the ritual's survivability is the design's real constraint.

What This Skill Produces

  • The structure — categories at statement-grain (8–15, not 40), the month × category grid, budget column with its source
  • The variance view — actual vs. budget with the month-and-YTD dual read, conditional signals at honest thresholds
  • The irregulars ledger — annual/lumpy expenses spread as monthly accruals so they stop being surprises
  • The ritual — the fifteen-minute monthly update, sourced from statements, calendared

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

  • The scope — household, team, or project budget; and the currency of pain ("we get surprised" vs "we can't approve spend" vs "the money just goes")
  • The spend sources — cards, invoices, payroll, reimbursements; categories must match how these report, or every update becomes archaeology
  • The budget numbers — from where (last year +X%? A plan? First-time guesses marked as guesses to be re-based at month 3)?
  • The irregulars — the annual/quarterly lumps (insurance, subscriptions (subscription-audit finds them), taxes, conferences) — listed, because the design accrues them

Framework: The Design Rules

  1. Grain follows the statement: categories are what spending arrives labeled as — if the card statement says "Software," a tracker with nine software sub-categories requires a coder, and the coder quits. 8–15 categories; anything needing more is two budgets.
  2. The dual read is the view: this-month variance (the early warning) AND year-to-date variance (the truth) — monthly noise means YTD is where "are we okay" actually lives, and trackers showing only months train panic-then-complacency cycles.
  3. Accrue the irregulars: every lumpy expense becomes a monthly twelfth in its category (the insurance is $60/month that bills annually) — the single design move that ends the "shock" pattern, because the shocks were scheduled all along. The irregulars ledger lists each lump, its month, and its accrual.
  4. Thresholds mean something: the variance signal fires at a level worth attention (±10% or a real amount, scaled to the category) — a tracker that flags $3 overruns in red teaches signal-blindness by March.
  5. The ritual is the moat: monthly, 15 minutes, from statements: fill actuals (statement-grain makes this transcription, not judgment), scan the dual read, write ONE sentence ("okay except software, +22% YTD — the new tool stack"). The sentence is the tracker's product; a tracker updated but unread is a diary, and one demanding an hour is abandoned.
Show full SKILL.md (206 more words)Show less

Output Format

Budget Tracker: [scope] — [year]

Structure

[Categories (statement-grained) × months · budget column + source note · the guesses marked for month-3 rebase]

Variance View

[Month + YTD columns · signal thresholds per category · the one-glance "are we okay" row]

Irregulars Ledger

LumpBills inAnnualMonthly accrual

The Ritual (15 min, calendared)

[Fill from statements → scan dual read → the one sentence → done]

Quality Checks

  • Categories map 1:1-ish to how spend arrives — no receipt requires judgment to code
  • Both month and YTD variance are visible; YTD carries the verdict
  • Every known lump is accrued monthly in the ledger
  • Thresholds are set at attention-worthy levels per category
  • The ritual fits in 15 minutes and ends in one written sentence

Anti-Patterns

  • Do not build 40 categories — granularity that outruns the statements kills the tracker
  • Do not read only the current month — noise up, noise down, lesson: read YTD
  • Do not let annual bills be "surprises" — they have dates; accrue them
  • Do not alert on trivial variance — red must mean something or it means nothing
  • Do not skip the sentence — an updated tracker nobody reads is maintenance cosplay

Example Trigger Phrases

  • "Build me a budget spreadsheet."
  • "Track team spend against budget."
  • "Why do we always blow the budget invisibly?"
  • "Design a household/project budget tracker."

© mohitagw15856, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in skills/budget-tracker-design of mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 1cbf1f0

Compare with similar skills

Budget Tracker Design next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Budget Tracker Design compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
Budget Tracker Design this skillmohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills1.4k—~1.3kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Anti Gambling Tradermars-tw/anti-gambling-trader-tw907—~1.9kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Data UpdateSixian-Li/plain-backtest204—~1.6kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Cn Ib Diligence WorkpaperQiushenZou/cn-investment-banking-skills102—~1.4kAutomated safety check: PassApache-2.0
Officecli Commonly TemplatesTeam-Commonly/commonly1.4k—~1.7kAutomated safety check: PassApache-2.0
Brigade Spreadsheet Builderspinabot/brigade11k—~1.4kAutomated safety check: PassMIT

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Questions about Budget Tracker Design

What does Budget Tracker Design do?

Design a budget-vs-actuals tracker that stays alive past February — the category grain that matches real statements, the variance view that answers 'are we okay', the update ritual small enough to…. Budget Tracker Design is an agent skill from mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills. Design a budget-vs-actuals tracker that stays alive past February — the category grain that matches real statements, the variance view that answers 'are we okay', the update ritual small enough to survive, and the honest handling of irregular expenses.

When should I use Budget Tracker Design?

Budget Tracker Design fits situations like: asked build me a budget spreadsheet; track team spend against budget; why do we always blow the budget invisibly; design a household/project budget tracker.

How do I install Budget Tracker Design in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills --skill budget-tracker-design -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/budget-tracker-design in mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills) into .claude/skills/budget-tracker-design in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Budget Tracker Design in Codex?

Run `npx skills add mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills --skill budget-tracker-design -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/budget-tracker-design in mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills) into .agents/skills/budget-tracker-design in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Budget Tracker Design in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills --skill budget-tracker-design -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/budget-tracker-design, .gemini/skills/budget-tracker-design, .github/skills/budget-tracker-design and .opencode/skills/budget-tracker-design in your project.

What does Budget Tracker Design need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Budget Tracker Design is instructions for the agent only.

Does Budget Tracker Design access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Budget Tracker Design safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Budget Tracker Design use?

Budget Tracker Design is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Budget Tracker Design use?

About 1.3k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 5.2k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full.

What are the alternatives to Budget Tracker Design?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Budget Tracker Design: Anti Gambling Trader (mars-tw/anti-gambling-trader-tw, 907 stars), Data Update (Sixian-Li/plain-backtest, 204 stars), Cn Ib Diligence Workpaper (QiushenZou/cn-investment-banking-skills, 102 stars) and Officecli Commonly Templates (Team-Commonly/commonly, 1.4k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Budget Tracker Design?

mohitagw15856 (a GitHub user) maintains it in mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills, which has 1,434 GitHub stars. The repository holds 1,348 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on October 9, 2026.

Source: mohitagw15856/pm-claude-skills on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.