Business Budget Template
Planning and executing your business financials right can quite literally make or break a company. Whether you are just getting started or have been running your operation for a while, this business budget template will help you get your numbers in order.
Back in 2016, a quick prediction in our financial model gave us a clue to make our company profitable: we ran the numbers on what would happen if we changed the percentage of users that paid for an annual plan versus a monthly plan. In a matter of weeks, we had increased our net revenue by 20% and made our operation self-sustainable, which also allowed us to invest more aggressively in our product and marketing teams.
The Business Budget we use is an evolution of a financial model template created by our investors at Carao Ventures. In this article you'll find both an XLS version of the template, as well as a fantastic presentation template in case you need to use it on a Board Meeting, or to your potential investors.
What's in a Business Budget Template
Our business budget template has the following sections:
SUMMARY SPREADSHEET:
This is a custom sheet you ought to edit based on your business' most immediate needs. Avoid calculating any formulas or dependencies here, simply use this sheet to get a glimpse into the most critical parts of your model.
FS-MONTH/FS-ANNUAL:
This is a regular Financial Statement page, which summarizes the regular Income, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow monthly or annualized statements.
REVENUE:
This sheet should be adapted based on your Business Model. The template you can download was designed for a SaaS product.
SG&A:
This is the main expenses sheet and the one you will want to update with your new hires, subscriptions and one-time expenses.
COGS:
COGS tracks the cost of producing goods, but this is not necessarily applicable to an internet business (though we use it for services that are essential for our app)
WK+CAPEX:
This is where you manage your physical equipment and goods. As a tech startup, most of our CAPEX is on laptops and some office furniture, but we consider it nonetheless, along with its estimated depreciation.
How to make a business budget?
We simply provided you with a blank canvas: all businesses are different, and it will take some work to get from this to something that works correctly for your company.
I'm going to highlight certain parts of it to give you an idea of projections that you can eventually automate using our template. It's hard to fake such complex data, so some of these screenshots belong to our live working model.
In this article about our financial model template we go into much more details on the essential parts of the model, to give you an idea of projections that you can eventually automate using our template.
Business Budget Presentation
As much as I love numbers, the slide part of this publication is the most appealing. We designed this presentation around:
- Executive Summary
- General Statistics
- Period Comparisons
- Financial Projections
- Achievements and Milestones
THIS PRESENTATION COULD BE USED FOR:
- Following up on an investor meeting, in case they requested an in-depth review of your projected financials.
- A budget presentation to your Board of Directors.
- A budget presentation and discussion with the company management team.
- If you are into the whole open data initiative, you can use this as a summary for your followers around your business plans.
I've found the exercise of putting complex information into a readable or presentable format handy, it often lets me arrange my ideas in a way that allows me to discuss them more easily.
