Building a Debt Payoff Planner in Notion

I built a handy debt paydown viewer in Notion to better learn the software and I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned. If you want make something like this, continue reading.

This dashboard uses formulas to calculate the interest and payoff date, as well as Notion’s built-in progress bars to visualize your financial goals.

Alright, so how do I get started?

I’m glad you asked! Let’s create a new page. I’m calling mine “Payoff Planner”.

Feel free to give it a icon and a cover image. (Flaticon is great for finding icons! More on this at the end!)

Styling optional, now create a new database, We’ll do a full page database.

Type the following in Notion

/databasef

On our new database page, let’s name it first thing. I’m calling this database Payoff because that feels better than “Debts” and it’s gonna get paid off (That’s psychology, baby!). I think it’s important our financial dashboard to look nice so we feel invited to stay on top our finances.

Let’s get to adding our properties.

What database properties do we need?

We need:

• Payment — The amount you pay each month
  • Type: Number
  • Number Format: US Dollar — adjust for your currency
• APR — The APR.
  • Type: Number
  • Number Format: Percent
• Balance — Your current balance. | Type: Number | Number Format: US Dollar
• Starting Balance — this will help with the progress bars. | Type: Number | Number Format: US Dollar

Left: Example Paydown database item titled “Demo Bank”. It has the following properties:

• Payment: $500.00
• APR: 20%
• Balance: $2,500.00
• Starting Balance: $10,000.00

Devil emoji for whoever owns your debt optional.

Creating a Progress Bar

This is super easy! Let’s create a new Formula property, name it Progress and click Edit under formula.

Now you can use Notion’s formula builder or you can just copy and paste the code below and click the “Done” button once finished.

1 - prop("Balance") / prop("Starting Balance")

Formula to calculate progress paying off a credit debt.

Now let’s turn this into a progress bar or ring!

Notion knows this formula returns a Number, so now you can set the Number Format to Percent

Click Bar or Ring under Show as to visualize that progress.

<aside> 💡 Tip: You see in the above example it came out to a whole number, but that’s rarely the case with balances. Notion will show the percentage up to ten decimal places. I don’t know about you, but that looks a little crazy to me.

</aside>

Thankfully, you can wrap the code above in a round function. If you want to add a decimal place to the progress read out, use the following: