Grocery Shopping

My recently married sister posted on facebook the other day that she was having a hard time doing a menu and shopping list. This type of chore is one of my favorites! I love making lists and I love love love using excel (or in my case Openoffice spreadsheets.) Its organization to the max! Here's what mine looks like. Its like a living thing, its constantly changing and growing.

This is my menu sheet. I just plan dinners for now because the boys eat the same thing every day. I have our pay days in gray so I know just how long to plan. Yellow is a day where we will not be home for dinner so no planning is needed. I do this page first. Decided what I have in the cabinets and what I can make out of it. Next I pick things that I want to eat and gather the recipes.

Menus

This screenprint is of the list of commonly purchased items. That way when I make a new list I can refer to this is list. I sort it alphabetically for easy navigating.  I take the ingredients that I need to purchase and add them to the next screen.

Commonly purchased items 

This is my actual shopping list. I budget for each item so I know how much I'm going to need to shop. When I get home I use my receipt and plug in the actual prices for each item. I just recently added a column for overages and savings. I also added coupons down at the bottom. I don't often use coupons and this was the first time I had some that took an amount of the total price at the end. I just added them at the bottom and but in their amount as -$2.00. 

List