Spend less time formatting spreadsheets and more time thinking about your budgets with our user-friendly Excel budget template. Build out a financial plan that helps you optimize costs and accomplish your financial goals. With clear step-by-step instructions, you’ll learn how to project revenue and set spending limits that maximize your profits. Get your free business budget template.
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What is a business budget spreadsheet?
A business budget spreadsheet is a template used to plan spend and expenses for a given period of time to maximize financial performance.
Used in either Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, it assists businesses in estimating income and expenses in the future so they can make predictions or alterations to their strategies.
After a budget is drafted using the template, you should track your actual spend levels against your budget to see where you’re spending more or less than anticipated. Seeing it broken down by expense category helps you understand what’s driving costs and how you could alter your spending to get back on track.
Why should you use a budget template for business?
Using a small business budget template provides several benefits, including:
Organization: A budget template gives you a framework through which you can start to organize your expected income and expenses. It ensures you’ve included all necessary information with a clear and concise breakdown so nothing gets missed.
Time-saving: By using a pre-designed template, you save time that would otherwise be spent creating a business budget from scratch. The template already includes formulas and formatting, so you can focus on personalizing it with your data.
Accuracy: Budget templates often include built-in formulas that automatically calculate totals, subtotals, and variances. By avoiding manual calculations you minimize the chance of a mistake affecting your budgeting.
Collaboration: Budget templates can be shared with team members or stakeholders, allowing for collaborative budgeting and transparency.
What’s included in a business budget?
A business budget sheet typically includes the following information:
Projected revenue
Budgeted total expenses
Budgeted expenses by category
Projected net income
Actual revenue
Actual total expenses
Actual expenses by category
Actual net income
Revenue variance
Expense variance
Net income variance
It’s important to note that the specific content and format of a budget sheet can vary depending on the business’s industry, size, specific financial needs, and the type of budget that’s being generated
How to prepare a business budget template
To create a business budget in Excel:
Step 1: Download our business budget Excel template. Step 2: Identify your financial goals. Step 3: Customize categories and labels. Step 4: Input your financial data. Step 5: Save and update regularly.
You can find more detailed instructions on how to use our business budget template upon download.
Remember, a business budget template should be a dynamic tool that evolves with your business. Regularly review and update it to reflect changes in your financial situation and business goals.
Business budget best practices
Business budgets are personalized—how you budget depends heavily on the size, industry, and growth stage of your business.
Define your business goals: A budget should always be informed by what you’re hoping to accomplish. The budget for a business with high growth ambitions will look different from one for a business looking to keep performance steady.
Start with historical data: Look back at past income statements or cash flow statements to get an idea of how your spending has trended over time. Some recurring costs like rent or software subscriptions are consistent and can be easily projected.
Treat your budget as a living document: Budgeting is not a one-time practice. Update your business budget with your actual numbers and make regular adjustments so you aren’t budgeting based on outdated assumptions.
Aspire for the best case but plan for the worst case: Generally speaking, a more conservative budget with wiggle room is better than a liberal budget that you’ll need to pull back from. Being overly ambitious is one way your business budget could fail.
Get critical about costs: Budgeting is a great opportunity to identify cost-cutting opportunities. As you start to plan ahead, try to identify costs as “wants” versus “needs.”
Business budget template FAQ
What is the purpose of a business budget template?
The purpose of a business budget template is to help you realize how profitable your business is. It can also help you find under-utilized funds that can be reinvested in more useful projects.
A budget can even provide insights once you know where all of your money is going. Analyzing your expenses can help predict seasonal changes in your business and other trends, allowing you to reallocate funds based on those needs.
Can this business budget template be used in Google Sheets?
Yes, download our business budget Excel template. Then in Google Sheets, follow these steps:
1. Create a new or open an existing spreadsheet.
2. Click File. Import.
3. Choose the Excel business budget template file and click Select.
4. Choose an import location option: 4a. Create new spreadsheet, 4b. Insert new sheet(s), 4c. or Replace spreadsheet.
5. Click Import data and you should have this business budget template in Google Sheets.
What timeframe should a business budget for?
A business budget could cover a time period as short as a month and as long as a year. What you choose should reflect how your business operates.
Newer businesses should prioritize being agile and budget for shorter periods. The learnings in one month will then inform the budget for the next.
More established businesses have more data to pull from and can confidently project their revenue and expenses. A long-term budget is more likely to be accurate and informative.
No matter the timeframe you choose, update your budget with the actuals as they come in so you can adjust your spending based on what’s happening in the real world.
What are the different types of budgeting methods?
Incremental budgeting: Look at the previous period’s budget and increase or decrease each category by a set percentage.
Zero-based budgeting: All spend levels start at zero with each expense being justified before it gets budgeted.
Activity-based budgeting: Define the activities that are necessary for business operations and then define the costs associated with each.
Performance-based budgeting: Budgeting starts with defining a performance results goal before defining the strategy and associated costs that accomplishes it.
Value proposition budgeting: Each expense is analyzed to define the value it adds; an expense is only budgeted for if the value outweighs the cost.
Static budgeting: Spending is defined at the start of the period and is not altered even if actual performance differs from the projection.
Flexible budgeting: Performance is constantly monitored with budgets adjusting based on actual results.
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