How to create a budget for your business or entrepreneurship in Microsoft Excel? Step by step guide

Nowadays, Excel It is listed as the main program of spreadsheets used to carry out endless mathematical, statistical and financial tasks. Since, thanks to the different options and tools it offers, simplifies the performance of all kinds of numerical calculations.

That is why, it is considered a program belonging to the office suite Microsoft Office specially designed for meet the needs of professionals in the administrative and accounting field. Reason why, allows create a budget easily.

Thus, there are many users who choose to use Excel to fulfill their job duties and thanks to this, it will be very simple process any type of budget for a business or venture. Next, we explain how can you do it and other information of interest.

What are all the expenses that should be considered when budgeting?

At the economy level, a budget is defined as the amount of money required to carry out a certain project or face a certain number of expenses necessary to achieve a goal or objective. Thus, it consists of an anticipated value that allows Estimate the total cost of carrying out a specific plan.

In this sense, the main purpose of a budget is based on defining and / or establishing an economic policy around the financial expenses incurred. Therefore, it is important to list all the possible expenses to carry out and thus, record them in this document. Therefore, when creating a budget for any company, business or venture, it is necessary to take into account certain aspects to be able to get quality results.

So, here we point out each of the costs to be valued in these cases:

A list relating to monthly income.
A list of the fixed costs that must be done during each month.
A Inventory of expenses that vary by month.
He cash flow In its whole.
A calculation of the existing difference between expenses and income.

Apart from that, it is also recommended comply with a set of phases or stages to make a budget satisfactorily.

Here we mention each one of them:

Set financial goals, as well as fixing the debts that have to be paid and specifying the expenses that you are trying to save.
Identify current income and expenses before creating a consumption plan.
Indicate everything in the expense budget, including the current expenses and the savings necessary to obtain the project to be completed, in addition to capital goods, direct labor, raw materials and taxes.
Put the budget in motionThat is, start with your applications to monitor the spending plan favorably. This will work to manage account balances and track expenses.
Evaluate or study the budget periodically and with this, determine if something is not working correctly.

Steps to create a budget in Microsoft Excel for your startup or business

Once all the above is detailed, it is time to know each and every one of the steps that must be followed to create a quality budget for any business, from the comfort of Microsoft Excel.

Taking into account that, there are two ways to proceed and, basically, they are through a pattern and manually:

With a template

In their day to day, self-employed professionals have to handle all kinds of financial information to start an optimal business and with it, create budgets, compare supplier prices, know how much money they get and how many expenses are there to ensure great control. Therefore, they are very useful work through templates compatible with excel for that.

In this way, we teach you how to proceed in these cases so that you do not have to prepare your financial budget manually:

The first step to follow is find and download a quote template in .xlsx format to use it directly in Excel.
Once you make this download, you have to access a blank spreadsheet of the program and open the downloaded template. For this, click on the "File" tab, click on "Open" and then select "Browse" to search the folders on your computer and double-click on the document in question.

Now automatically you will see the template in your excel document. So, it will be time to modify and / or edit each of the fields provided, according to your budget type and all the information you need to highlight.

Also, using the editing tools offered by Excel, you can easily customize the template to your liking.

How you can see, it is a very easy method to carry out, in addition to practical; to prepare any amount of budgets from Excel, just by obtaining templates hosted on the net.

Manually

On the other hand, there are numerous users who, unlike using a pattern to make your documents, prefer to do it manually to obtain a further customization.

That is why, it is also relevant to explain the steps that must be followed to make a professional budget in Excel manually:

Initially, open a blank spreadsheet within the program, and then click on cell A1 to enter the title of your budget page there.
Followed by that, click on cell A3 of the book and add the following "Articles, elements or parameters". For this, include each of the sections to take into account, in the form of a list.
Now directly in cell B3, proceed to write "Earned Income". In that column, place the corresponding purchased tickets for each item.
After in box C3, enter the term "Expenses". Of course, in this list, you have to place all the consumptions made by each section in a proportionate way.
Once the budget table is created, you will see the list that you have created with your income and expenses incurred. Taking into account that, each of the figures that you add there must correspond to the same period of the month under study.
In addition, if you want to adjust the format of the entered values and that they are displayed in decimals, we recommend going to the Excel toolbar and select the option “Increase decimals” in the Numbers group. We also advise you choose the accounting number format (currency type) in that same group.
To calculate the total income earned during that time period, just click on the last cell in column B to select the "Autosuma" option in "Start> Modify group" and select "Sum" to press the Enter key and get the result in that box.

Subsequently, you can do the same procedure with column C belonging to the expenses incurred. That is, placing yourself in the last cell of that group, to carry out the previous procedure.
Now in cell D3 you can enter the term "Net income" to know how much budget you have, for each parameter studied.
Then, to perform the calculation, click on box D4 to enter the sign "=", choose cell C4 and add the sign "-" to select cell B4 (as we show you in the image). So, when you press the Enter key, you will know the net income for that parameter and thus, you must proceed with all the others on the list.

In case of obtaining negative results during any of the previous operations, the box will be displayed in red automatically and the result with this sign. When you get all the net income, you can make the total sum of the same as we explained before.

Finally, if you want, you can also customize your budget table easily. In this case, select all the listings by dragging the mouse cursor, to click on the "Insert" tab, select "Table" and proceed to edit the aspect or styles of the same with the tools that the same program offers you from the tab "Table Tools> Design ”.

List of the best templates to make custom quotes in Excel

In case you are one of those users who prefer to make their personalized budgets using a template compatible with Excel, for reasons of ease and / or productivity, it will be much more useful if you have these documents on hand to download.

Therefore, below and in the form of a list, we present some interesting alternatives to prepare quality budgets:

Personal budget

Basically, it is a pattern that is used to control each and every one of the income and expenses that a person carries out in his day to day. In this way, it offers the possibility of making a comparison between the expected income and expenses around the reals.

Regarding its characteristics, we distinguish that it has a section to detail income and another to set all expenses. It is also capable of calculating the deviation between what has been established and what has happened from the lowest level of detailing to the grand total. Fortunately, can be used for different periods of weather (weekly, monthly or yearly) and it is also possible to edit this pattern.

Download Excel Personal Budget Template

Expense control

Refers to an ideal template for carry out an optimal and timely follow-up of your distribution of expenses at a completely detailed level and in a simple way. Since, it allows to register all the expenses month by month and both by category and also by associated subcategory. So, every month that has passed will show the total cost, the maximum cost and the minimum cost made.

In addition to this, said budget template for Excel it has totals and percentage of expenditure with opening by category at an annual level, in order to make a more exhaustive study. It also has a report sheet where you add all the values of each group and subgroup on a monthly basis and even, displays a quality control alert that warns of any errors when the totals do not match.

Download Excel Cost Control Template

Marketing budget

This is a marketing plan document that It is written in terms of costs, basically. In this way, it helps to appropriately track marketing spending by identifying what is left of the budget to consume during the rest of the year and, therefore, provides a good analysis of what is spent on marketing.

Among its most interesting features, we highlight that it has a sheet that allows list each of the marketing media along with their allocated net budget. Additionally, it has a page of descriptive reports of the open budget through marketing and allows to measure the budget at absolute and percentage level.

Download Marketing Budget Template Excel

Construction budget

It is a document that allows obtaining the a priori estimate of a construction site and thus, is based on forecasting costs by adding a profit margin. Taking into account that, thanks to its characteristics, it is ideal for have as real an idea as possible of the expenses involved in the project in question.

For its part, it has a sheet where it summarizes the cost per concept, it also has a sheet where each parameter must be detailed with its unit and total value, allows adding more items to consider other aspects and is a template that can be easily edited or modified.

Download Excel Project Budget Template

Sales budget

From this type of budget, anyone can determine or estimate the future of your venture by planning the activities to be carried out. Well, it is usually a template that is used to make forecasts about the production, costs and sales that you have to approximate for your business for a period of one year. Therefore, apart from considering the internal context of the company, the user must also assess what happens in the market in general.

As the total calculation will depend on the future demand that is estimated. Now, distinguishing its most important characteristics, we find that it is necessary to introduce the production volume that is appreciated for the following years for each product and also have to add the price and cost of each item to sell. All this will allow you get approximate sales value and profit margin (with absolute value and in percentage).