How can small businesses improve their budget and cash flow management?

Small businesses from film studios and start-ups to ad agencies and nonprofits often struggle with managing their budgets, especially when there is no CFO in sight.

• Estimating and tracking budgets is usually done through an error-prone combination of make-shift spreadsheets and gut feeling, which leave gaping holes in data.
• Budgeting, as opposed to accounting, lacks universal terminology. As a result, project managers, CEOs, accountants, and board members are not on the same page regarding key budgetary indicators.
• Budget managers are not always in charge of the estimate vs actual expenses
• Budget managers are not always in charge of how much money has been actually spent vs how much has been allocated, but still in your piggy.
• Project budgets follow different formats and sit in silos, either across different functions of the organisation or simply in separate files. This makes data consolidation and cash flow forecasting frustrating.

Do any of those pain points ring a bell? That’s why we have compiled the BudgetMatador budget template (free download link below). The template streamlines estimating and tracking budget items, while offering granularity usually reserved for high-end cash management applications.

Right-click > Open in new tab > Download the free Excel budget template.

Continue reading this post for guidelines on adopting and using the template. A few words of wisdom before getting to the guidelines:

• We provide the template “as is” and can’t take any responsibility for the consequences of using this file — even though we’d love to get the credit;
• On that note — feel free to send us feedback at senor@budgetmatador.com.

Grab your money by the horns!

Guidelines for using the BudgetMatador project budget template

This is a fairly lightweight template for single cost centres (by which we mean a project, a department, a product etc. — as you see fit). It’s not designed to keep track of multiple budgets, even though it could be adjusted accordingly.

The template comprises of four sections: Budget Dashboard, Costs and Incomes as well as Monthly Cash Flows. Each section is briefly described below, while particular terminology is defined in the comments of the spreadsheet. (Excel does not keep the formatting of the comments, so resize by right-clicking on the cell > Edit Comment > drag border.)

In addition to the empty template with instructions, you can take a look at the extra worksheets, which serve as examples of estimating and tracking your budgets across the project life cycle. Feel free to delete the instructional comments and worksheets once you have an understanding of the budget structure.

This template will get you started, but you can also:

• add/remove columns to tailor what data is attributed to budget items;
• copy the template worksheet to keep track of several budgets in one file;
• if you’re more experienced in working with spreadsheets, you can also build a master budget to aggregate data from different worksheets to keep track of overall cash flows.

Budget Dashboard
The Budget Dashboard summarizes Basic and Advanced indicators — a range of Totals — from the Costs and Incomes sections. They are reliable as long as the data in the cost and income sections is up-to-date. Cells in the dashboard are not meant for editing, even though you can tweak them according to your needs.

Cost and Income Sections
The functions of these section is self-explanatory, but it’s worth pointing out that both costs and incomes come in two varieties — as Estimates (green rows) and Actuals (white rows).

Estimated Items serve as a basis for tracking the budget, so they need be added even if the exact item details (sum, service provider etc) are known. If this is the case, you can simply add the Actual Items under the Estimated ones with identical values.

Instructions for adding Budget/Income Lines and Cost/Income items are placed on the right-hand side of the budget form.

Monthly Cash Flows

This section helps you forecast Estimated and track Actual monthly spending. To create your forecasts (also called projections), you need to manually enter the expected month when the cost or income item is due. Mark them in the Estimates (green) rows. To track Actuals, you need to manually enter when the cost/income was actually paid out in the Actuals (white) rows

Excel vs. Google Sheets

The Excel version is fast and improves access to data due to the collapsible row and column groups. You can collaborate on the Excel template by storing it on a file sharing platform such as Dropbox or Google Drive.

If you want to use the template on Google Sheets, simply import the file into Google Sheets (unfortunately, Google Sheets does not allow making copies of view-only files, which is why you need to go through the import process).