Whether you're a business owner, a project manager, or preparing to launch a startup – effective budget management is critical to successfully operating a business. While budgeting provides valuable financial insight, it can often be time-consuming. To streamline the process, many organizations turn to Microsoft Excel as a tool for project budget planning.
An Excel budget template is a pre-designed spreadsheet that can be used to create and manage a budget. It includes a layout used to organize and track various types of financial information, such as income, expenses, and savings. Additionally, the template may include built-in formulas, charts, and other tools to help with visualizing and analyzing your data.
Using a project planning template with pre-configured features can be a great time-saving option for any organization. Here are a few advantages of using an Excel budgeting template:
Here are some of our favorite Excel budget templates. Each is designed for a different use case but can be adapted to accommodate any project.
This robust Excel Project Budget template from Vertex42 can help you break down your project cost by items or tasks. Keep track of multiple projects at the same time, with each project and task having dedicated columns for:
Alternatively, if you are looking for more advanced features, Spreadsheet.com’s Project Budget template can be a good alternative to Excel.
This workbook allows you to organize your project costs by task, including a combination of fixed costs, materials, labor, and other expenses. The budget for each task is calculated automatically using a Column Formula data type. The subtotal column uses the Descendant Cells function and the Indent feature to add up the costs of all sub-tasks. It automatically calculates the budget for each task, making it easy to see the overall budget.
This Project Budget with WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) template streamlines the process of identifying and organizing all expenses associated with a complex project. The WBS breaks down a project into smaller, manageable tasks, making it easier to plan and track progress.
This workbook categorizes costs based on the Work Breakdown Structure format. It includes the functionality to input material and labor rates and amounts for each task, automatically determining costs.
Additionally, it allows you to easily calculate your projected budgets and compare them to the actual costs.
As an alternative to this Excel template, you can use Spreadsheet.com’s Detailed Project Budget with WBS template.
This template also follows the Work Breakdown Structure method and uses row hierarchies to break down budget items by task. Also, it uses rich data types for assigning tasks to owners, tracking their status, and including attachments. Using Related rows, you can easily link budget items to contracts and vendors and track their spending.
Without proper financial planning, even the most innovative business idea is unlikely to succeed. This Excel Business Budget template from Vertex42 offers a comprehensive solution by consolidating all necessary budget tracking elements into a single, easy-to-use worksheet, including essential information such as:
By entering your information into this template, you can view your automatically-calculated gross and net profits, giving you a more accurate idea of your financial forecast.
As an alternative, the Vertex42 team created this Startup Budget template in Spreadsheet.com:
This budget template has two primary sections: Costs and Funding. The Costs section divides overall expenses into fixed and monthly expenses. The fixed expenses category encompasses typical expenses associated with launching a startup business, such as advertising, franchise fees, computer equipment, and permits and licenses.
The monthly expenses, including rent, utilities, and salaries, are listed in a separate section and are calculated by multiplying the subtotal by the number of months selected.
This budget template is a great asset to help you document all of your startup expenses and model out when you'll turn profitable.
This Excel Budget Calculator template will help you prepare and manage your monthly budget. Just list your income and outline your predicted expenses, and you’re ready to make financial planning decisions based on real data.
There’s no learning curve – just download it and rename budget categories as needed.
As an option, you can plan out your budget using Spreadsheet.com’s Simple Monthly Budget template.
With this template, you can also plan out your budget and outline your projected income and actual income, projected expenses and actual expenses, and easily identify any deviations.
Although we haven’t found a particularly noteworthy Excel construction budget template, Spreadsheet.com’s template offers a wealth of functionality. In fact, it offers more features than the average Excel template could.
Unlike budget templates in Excel, Spreadsheet.com provides a Related Rows feature that links information across worksheets. Related Rows transform your template into a relational database and connect different project components such as budget items, invoices, purchases, rentals, vendors, and subcontractors across all three worksheets.
This Construction Budget template is designed to help teams organize, manage, and monitor spending throughout the project lifecycle.
In the Budget spreadsheet, you can easily use cost codes to group different expenses into parent categories to track your actual spending versus your planned budget.
Under the Vendors & Subcontractors tab, you can list out all external vendors that are engaged in your construction project. Unlike Excel, you can easily insert images and other files directly into spreadsheet cells. This allows you to keep vendor contracts and other important documentation like invoices in one place.
The Invoices & Purchases sheet is where you can keep track of all of your invoices by contractor and monitor if it has been paid.
Additionally, you can create automations to receive notifications if a project is running over budget or if an invoice is overdue.
Explore Spreadsheet.com’s Budget templates and manage your business or personal finances more effectively by setting financial goals, tracking spending, and identifying areas where more cost-savings can be implemented.
