This is one of my favourite subjects and I have many spreadsheets dedicated to it!
I decided to sort my money situation out after being rubbish at it for years, so the 'pay yourself a wage' method was useless to me as I had no cushion & when I first started budgeting properly I still needed to use all the money I made every month.
I made a spreadsheet with the following columns:
Date Company Show Payment Category Amount Running Total
Most of them are self explanatory, the payment column is for everything, outgoings and income, the category column is to help me mine the data to find spending/income patterns. I fill it in religiously with everything I spend or earn (I give myself allowances for food/discretionary spending and travel costs so it doesn't get too nitty gritty). This way I can plan months in advance, see exactly how much I need to pay all my bills and make sure everything gets paid on time. One of the things I was terrible at was taking care of all my financial responsibilities as soon as I got paid from a job, and leaving myself nothing to buy food and petrol with.
The running total column means I can see exactly how much I should have in my account on any given day, when you don't have the same income every month it's a godsend to be able to see if something's gone wrong.
It's got a bit more complicated since then, I added columns to help me pay off my overdraft and to help me analyse it all a bit more, but the basic concept is still there. I also got fancy with some conditional formatting, and pivot tables, oh my god do I love me some pivot tables!
Basically it's changed my life! I have 6 weeks of no work between panto finishing and my next contract, and I have money saved to cover everything, it's the first time in my life I've not had to borrow between jobs.