Excel Foundations: Build a Café Expense Tracker

<p>Leila Haddad runs Poppyseed Café, and her bank will lend her the money to expand, if she can show a clean summary of her first-quarter expenses and a budget to compare them against. Her records are a card export and a shoebox of hand-typed receipts, and her first total is short by the price of a new grinder. Across five lessons you build her expense tracker from zero in your own personal workbook: SUM and friends, numbers stored as text, absolute references, Excel Tables, dropdowns, SUMIF and SUMIFS, conditional formatting and a chart. Every lesson then hands the same job to your AI (Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini) and shows you exactly how to catch its mistakes. In the capstone your agent builds the messy second quarter end to end, and you prove it right.</p>

Tools: Excel Formulas (SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT), Absolute References, Excel Tables, SUMIF and SUMIFS, Data Validation, Conditional Formatting, AI Assistants for Excel