Budgeting can be a challenge for (small) business owners. Let us introduce you to budget templates - these documents can make your life easier by streamlining the budgeting process. See below for Futrli's guide on business budget templates.
Budget templates defined
A budget template is a document that shows estimated monthly income and expenses over a set period of time. Most budget templates should include the following information:
- Fixed and variable costs incurring for your business
- Semi-variable costs that depend on eg sales
- Expected revenue (how much money/ sales your business is likely to make)
- Profits
You can tailor your budgeting templates to include other information, like individual names to amounts or sources of investor capital. If your business has multiple locations, different templates may be required.
Why use a budget planner template?
Budget templates are helpful for a variety of reasons, they give you the ability to plan how to achieve your financial objectives by tracking cash flow, revenue, and business expenses. Budget templates allow you to plan for business slowdowns as well as busy periods and allocate your budget to where it is most required. You'll be able to see how your projections are coming along, and you'll have a better idea of whether you're on track for success. It's also an excellent method to monitor the results of your budget changes and plan for essential purchases.
Create your business's budget template
Depending on what information you wish to have on your personal budget template, the process of creating the document is likely to differ slightly. However, there are a number of key steps in creating your business budget template:
Collect historical information
- This concerns a number of metrics, such as staff salaries, operating costs, sales, and revenues.
Estimate sales
- Identify the number of sales you can expect to record in a year (consider holiday seasons and other external factors).
Establish profit goals
- Based on realistic revenue projections working with your annual budget and define profit goals for your company.
Work out your fixed and variable costs
- Calculate the total of your fixed (rent, licenses, insurance) and variable (materials, labor, benefits, etc.) monthly expenses to be included in the template.
Calculate profit margin
- Now calculate your company's profit margin by subtracting expenses from estimated sales. This also needs to take into account any costs like shipping and equipment.
Adjust over time
Your budget needs to be adjusted as you go along - things in your company might change so this needs to be a flexible process.
Free budget templates
Now that you know a little more about how monthly budget templates work, let's look at some of the options accessible online. The best budget templates don't need to cost a fortune. Google Sheets, Microsoft Office, Capterra, and Smartsheet are just a few of the sites offering free templates and budget template models.
