Our story

Hi, I'm Ellen.

I'm a mum of two from Walthamstow, in north-east London, and I studied Accounting and Finance at Cass Business School (it's called Bayes now). I was supposed to end up in a corner office in the City.

Instead, I spent the last eight years helping families sort out their money at my kitchen table. Every spreadsheet in this shop started there.

Ellen CarterFounder of EllenSorts · Walthamstow, London

Maidstone, Kent · 2008

Never scared of opening the post

I grew up in a terraced house in Maidstone where money was often short. My mum did hair in our kitchen and my dad drove night buses. On Sunday evenings, Mum spread the bills across the kitchen table with a calculator and a pile of envelopes: one for food, one for electricity, one for Christmas.

When I was ten I started helping her add up the receipts. Putting order into the chaos calmed me. One night I saw her cry over a letter from the bank, and I made myself a promise: I'd never be scared of opening the post. A few years later, I was the first in my family to go to university.

London · 2016–2018

The City dream, and a change of plan

At eighteen I started my BSc in Accounting and Finance at Cass. Every morning I walked past the towers of the City and pictured myself up there, in a blazer, with a badge round my neck. I even had a Pinterest board called “CFO by 35”. At weekends I waited tables on Exmouth Market, which is where I met Tom, a commis chef who always saved me a slice of dessert.

At nineteen, at the start of my second year, I found out I was pregnant. Some people told me that was it for my career. I sat my exams eight months pregnant, and Freddie was born in June 2018. I was twenty.

You're not bad with money. You've just been keeping your whole household in your head.

Ellen

Walthamstow · 2018–2020

The first spreadsheet

Those first months were hard. We were in a one-bed flat, Tom was working sixty hours a week, and we had £6,400 of credit card debt. One November night, while Freddie slept, I did what Cass had taught me: a proper review of our household, line by line, like a business. I found more than £350 a month leaking away. Nineteen months later, the debt was gone.

Then I met Sophie at a Stay & Play at the library, and showed her my spreadsheet. She told her sister, her sister told a colleague, and soon families of every age were knocking on my door. They started saying “Ellen sorts it”. During lockdown I helped them on Zoom from my kitchen, with Freddie on my lap, and in July 2020 I graduated with First Class Honours, in the kitchen, in a cardboard hat Tom made me.

2021–2023

The letter from the City

In 2021 the letter I'd waited for since I was eighteen arrived: a graduate scheme at a Big Four firm in the City. I was pregnant with Poppy. One evening, I read the offer again at the kitchen table, next to a drawing Freddie had made of the four of us. I did the maths. I would see my children for an hour a day. I said no.

Helping families became my full-time work. I built our own six-month safety fund, and in 2023 it let Tom leave restaurant kitchens for a job cooking for local primary schools, home every evening. In his words: “She didn't just sort our money. She gave me my kids back.”

8 yearshelping families sort their money

5,000+families using my spreadsheets

3:15at the school gate, every day

2024–today

300 families waiting, and one way to help them all

By 2024, more than 300 families were on my waiting list, and I could only help about ten a month. Telling mums in tears “not for six months” broke my heart, but I didn't want to build a team or become an absent mum again.

So through 2025, in the evenings when the kids were asleep, I turned eight years of spreadsheets and methods into systems anyone can use on their own. That's EllenSorts: everything I know, for a one-off small price, no subscription. My laptop closes at 2:45, and at 3:15 I'm at the school gate.