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My original tracker is still up and running and updated to reflect current budget amounts as of 06 June 2024, if you’d prefer to use that one, or want to understand more about My Tech High and the history of this tracker click here. I also have created a version that works with the Utah Education Fits All Scholarships which you can find here.

UPDATE 11-11-2020: I’ve added support to select the full year program or half year program which will adjust all of your budgets based on whether you’re starting in August or January. By default it will assume the full year program but make sure you select the half year program if you’re starting in January so that you don’t have your budgets doubled in the spreadsheet!

UPDATE 06-06-2024: I updated the budget amounts for kindergarteners to reflect that they will now receive full funding :)

UPDATE 06-08-2024: I’ve finally duplicated the spreadsheet to work for the Oregon program! Colorado is hopefully coming soon

UPDATE 06-10-2024: I have updated the Utah sheet to reflect the amounts and periods that combine to reflect the newly increased custom built budgets and adding tech class to the periods that can combine 🎉🎉🎉 I don’t know about anyone else, but that made my budgeting a bit easier! I still need to go back and see if Oregon had similar changes or not, and I’m still working on Colorado.

I have been maintaining this tracker for a couple years now and I’ve been so happy to see it help so many people! This year as My Tech High announced funding increases for their students I decided it was time to update my reimbursement tracker too. I started by just updating the formulas to reflect the new amounts. I tried to convince myself I was done then… but then I spent a week totally revamping the whole process and basically rebuilding the whole thing. So let me tell you what’s new and how to use it 🙂

New Features

  • Multiple Students in One Workbook: This was by far and away the biggest add. You can now manage the schedules and budgets for all of your students in one workbook (assuming you have less than 20 students, if you have more than 20 students then I really hope you have better organization skills than I do and heaven bless you!)
  • Budgets Categorized by Class instead of Budget Block: Maybe no one else ran into this but it would bother me all the time. In my old workbook all expenses were matched up with their budget block. So if you had a combined custom core for Math/English/Science that was one category. This was fine unless you changed your Science class from being custom built to being 3rd party. Then you’d have to go in and change all of your expenses to be associated either with this new 3rd party science class or with the new “Custom Core – Math, English” category. Now you simply select the subject the expense is associated with and it will follow that subject into whatever bucket you have it in at the time.
  • Custom Formatting: This may not have been the most important, but it was the most satisfying part of the process! I’ve changed the font to be a little prettier, added lots of color coding and generally made the whole thing more visually pleasing.

So let’s jump in to how to use it. If you don’t want to read through all of this I’ve made a little video tutorial that you can watch that shows you all of the steps.

The first thing you need to do is make a COPY of my spreadsheet. I was able to update the link to make a copy for you automatically, so no more worrying about accidentally trying to edit the master workbook 😂 I currently have versions for both Utah and Oregon – I’m working on Colorado and hopefully that will be up soon. Be sure to get the right one!

MTH Reimbursement Tracker – Utah
MTH Reimbursement Tracker – Oregon 

You will get a screen that looks like the screenshot below –

Don’t be nervous about the attached script file – it’s code that I had to use to make all the calculations work. But feel free to look through it if you’re concerned (I’ll never tell someone they’re being too cautious with security on the internet). It’s not strictly necessary, but the first thing I would do is rename your spreadsheet something like “MTH [school year] so that you don’t get your workbooks mixed up in future years.

Now you’re ready to begin filling it out.  I’ve tried to lock as many of the ranges that you shouldn’t be changing as possible, so if you get a warning box saying not to change something – please try to heed it! The first thing you will need to do is select if your children are participating in the full year or half year program. If you’re starting (or already started) in September pick full year, if you’re starting in January pick half year. This will adjust your budget amounts to be either the full amounts or halved amounts depending on when you started the program.

The first thing you will do is enter your students’ names and grades in the Students sheet. You can also pick a color for each student which will just make the rest of the workbook prettier – and making it pretty is what’s most important right? Once you’ve done that go to the bottom of the page and click the “Schedules” worksheet.

You will see that your students’ names have already been populated and options corresponding to your students’ grades will show up. I like to go to the bottom and hide all of the schedules that are for non-existent students – just to make the experience a little bit cleaner for myself. To do this simply select the first row of empty schedules and then select all the way down to the last row. Then right click and you will see the option to “hide rows”, click that and all the extra schedules to disappear.

In the first column the only selection you need to make is whether your student is doing History or Science this year. DO NOT CHANGE THE SUBJECT NAMES! I get that it’s annoying seeing it pop up as “Elective 1” and you would rather have it say “Gymnastics” or “Orchestra” or “Speech & Debate”, but if you change how the subjects read here it will mess up the very delicate formulas that keep the spreadsheet ticking. Feel free to put those names in as the description instead 🙂 Don’t change anything in the 2nd column. In the 3rd column you will select whether the classes are going to be custom built, 3rd party or My Tech High Direct. You will notice that as you change these selections that the funds in the second column change to correspond with the budgets you will receive from My Tech High. The 4th column is optional but it gives you a space to write out your course descriptions. You can use this as a place to take notes of things you want to do or to write out your official course descriptions that you will submit to My Tech High. If you use it for writing your official descriptions you might notice that in the last column there is a character counter. It will tell you how many characters you have left before you exceed the course description character limit in InfoCenter. You’re welcome to write more characters in the worksheet, no one will see this other than you. Ok you’ve finished the hard part now on to where the magic happens! Open up the budgets worksheet and we’ll continue on 🙂

On the left it shows a budget breakdown for each of your students. At the top it tells you how much money you have remaining to spend. You will not need to make any changes to these columns because everything will be calculated automatically. Here’s what my kids’ budgets look like right now. You can see that I’m over budget for Sam in a couple of categories but it doesn’t take those negative amounts away from the total available to spend because you can’t spend over the limit for any particular category.

Let’s go on to the purchase list. Here you will simply enter in the items you have purchased, the price paid and then select the student and subject the purchase is associated with. As you do that you will notice that all of the “remaining” balances will update to show you how much is left in each category. If you select a subject with a student that doesn’t have that subject on their schedule the item will turn red and you’ll get an error message off to the side so that you can make sure to put that expense with a valid student/subject combination. Ok one last worksheet to go! Go ahead and click on the “Reimbursement Cover Sheet”

You won’t need the reimbursement cover sheet until it’s time to submit your receipts but I find this to be really handy. At the top of the page you can select a student and a budget and then the rest of the workbook populates with all of the purchases for that period. I will print this page to a PDF and then use it to help me make sure I have all of my receipts together before submitting them at reimbursement time. (EDITED: I used to use the free program PDFBinder to put the cover sheet first and then add all of the receipts in the order they’re listed on my cover sheet. However with their new submission system the cover sheet is redundant – but I still use it to help me make sure that I gather all the right receipts for each submission.) Once you’ve already made one submission and you need to make another then if you go back to the Budgets worksheet and check off the “Submitted?” boxes on the expenses that you’ve already been reimbursed for, then when you go back to the Cover Sheet worksheet you’ll see that it only displays the receipts that you haven’t yet been reimbursed for. So that can be handy for helping you keep organized.

One last tip for anyone who considers themselves lightly advanced. If you want to sort your purchases – Select all of the purchase list cells by clicking on the “Item Purchased” cell and dragging your mouse until you are down to the submitted column on your last row. Then go to the “Data” menu and select “Sort range”.

Check the “Data has a header row” box and then you can sort things however you like. I usually like to sort by student, then by subject and then by cost high to low. The sorting won’t stay as you enter in more items, but I find this to be handy as I’m trying to keep organized – especially when I’m getting ready to submit.

And that’s it!  Hopefully this helps you to better keep track of your MyTechHigh expenses and budget in the coming years!  If you notice anything that I’ve missed please comment below so that I can get it fixed! 

How to Say Thank You

I can’t say enough how much it means just to read comments of people who have been helped by my tracker. Leave a comment here or tag me on Facebook – you have no idea how much that makes my day! These trackers have taken a lot of work and it really just makes me happy to know that they are helpful to others ❤️

If you really want to be helpful, if you would consider following my page on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter it would really help me as I try to grow this website into a thriving community. I try to post things that are interesting and I have lot of other great resources – homeschooling, tech, that I’d love to get out to everyone.

You can also consider making a purchase through my affiliate shop (I’m trying to update it with all of my favorite homeschooling resources) to help me keep this site going or making a donation to my site.  If you’re looking for more ideas on what curriculum you want to use check out my curriculum recommendations post or if you’re looking for ideas on how to schedule your day check out my homeschool scheduling post. Happy Homeschooling 🙂

Here’s a link to the spreadsheet again, just so you don’t have to hunt through the article to find it – MyTechHigh Reimbursement Tracker 2.0.

Side note: Everything above shows actual items I’ve been reimbursed for and course descriptions I’ve had approved.  Feel free to use the descriptions and purchase list for inspiration for your own child’s schedule.  Just a quick plug for a couple of things we’ve especially loved –

  • Kiwi Crates – these have been SO much fun for all of my kids and they’ve learned a ton from them.  I’ve gotten 1 subscription and made my three kids share it and it’s been great. I thought I was going to like the Kiwi Crate but it’s been so much better than I’d expected. We’ve tried nearly every single type of crate they offer and they’re all fantastic!  If you use my referral link you get $10 off of your subscription 🙂
  • Tuttle Twins these books are AMAZING at teaching your kids about the role of government and how laws work. They are definitely from a libertarian perspective and they’re very engaging – I’ve even had lots to think about and discuss after reading them!
  • Audible subscription – This is one of my favorite things to get reimbursed every year. We have had a subscription since 2009 and have over 1000 audiobooks. My kids are able to listen to books that might be well above their actual reading level and digest ideas that otherwise might seem beyond them.
  • Touch, Type, Read and Spell– I have a couple of dyslexic kids and this program has been awesome in helping them learn how to not only type but also giving them the basic building blocks for reading.
  • Homeschool Planet – I have loved this program to keep our homeschool days organized and to know what everyone needs to get done each day. The rescheduling features work great when you inevitably have to take a day off, and they have tools for creating your own transcripts and much more. I haven’t tried getting it reimbursed in the past but it’s well worth the subscription fee!

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with My Tech High other than as a parent to students within the program. This tracker is provided free of charge and without warranty. I intend to keep all formulas and information current and accurate however I accept no liability for any faults in the program. Use at your own risk.