The Cost Per Nut Spreadsheet Template: The DIY Guide to Dating Financial Enlightenment

Apps are great, but a spreadsheet is the perfect first home for your CPN data. It's free, it's flexible, and it forces you to actually understand the math before you let a tool hide it from you. Five minutes in Google Sheets is the cheapest possible course on dating ROI.

The other advantage: you'll see the shape of the data before you have any opinions about it. Once you're in an app, the dashboards do the editorializing for you. The raw spreadsheet keeps you honest.

Column A: Date. The calendar date of the interaction. Without this you can't compute monthly CPN, which is the most useful unit.

Column B: Girl. A name or initials. Resist the urge to use codenames — when the data gets stale, you'll lose track of who's who.

Column C: Spend ($). Total dollars on that interaction, all-in. Drinks, food, transport, tickets, cover, parking, gifts. Round up. Honest numbers only.

Column D: Time (hr). Hours spent. Include travel time. This is the column most guys forget, and the one that ruins most of the "low CPN" boasts.

Column E: Outcome (0/1). Did the date result in your defined outcome? Pick a definition and stick with it for the whole sheet.

At the bottom of the sheet, three cells do the work. =SUM(C:C) gives total spend. =SUM(E:E) gives total outcomes. =SUM(C:C)/SUM(E:E) gives your aggregate CPN.

Add a fourth, monthly CPN: filter by month (or use SUMIFS) and run the same ratio. Watch the monthly number trend over six rows of data. That trend is the entire story your spreadsheet has to tell.

If you want to get fancy: a pivot table by Girl with sum of Spend and sum of Outcome gives you per-girl CPN. That's where the real revelations live. Most guys discover their top-spend girl is also their lowest-outcome girl. The pivot table is unflinching.

Mistake one: undercounting spend. "I forgot about the bar before dinner" is the single most common reason a CPN looks better than it should. If in doubt, round up.

Mistake two: changing your outcome definition mid-sheet. You can't switch from "any kiss" to "sex only" halfway through and expect the trend to mean anything. Define once, hold the line.

Mistake three: not logging zeros. Dates with no outcome are the most important rows on the sheet. Skip them and your CPN will look fictional.

Mistake four: rounding time to the nearest hour. A two-hour dinner that runs to four hours doubled your time CPN whether you wrote it down or not.

Spreadsheets are perfect until you hit one of three walls. Wall one: you stop opening the sheet because it's friction. Wall two: you have too many girls to keep the pivot table clean. Wall three: you want to actually compare yourself to other guys and see if your numbers are reasonable.

When any of those hits, you're ready for the app. We built one. It does everything the spreadsheet does and adds leaderboards, share cards, and the kind of charts you can post to a group chat. Start with a 3-day free trial.