Managing your money as a student whilst at uni can be quite complex as grants and loans often come in after your first rental deposits are due. Not to mention money for travel, food and freshers week!

It is important then to understand the timing of your receipts and payments to cover everything you need.

You can use simple tools such as Excel to create a cash budget to help you organise and manage your money.

Knowing when you are going to have a short term deficit means you will be able to plan ahead and either delay some spending or arrange an overdraft if you need to.

Try this template to estimate your cashflow. You could also copy the sheet to record your actual costs and then compare the two.