Small Business Budget Series Part 1

You know that as a small business owner, you need to manage your business budget. You have to know what your money is doing and where it is going otherwise your business will fail. There are a lot of accounting and budgeting software out, and you probably are using one of them right now, or your accountant is using one. But, you could actually manage your business budget using the simple workbook in Excel, and I will show you how. I remember that when I work in the corporate world in the cruising industry, I was in charge of keeping the budget for my own department.

Now, our company had its own fancy accounting software but each department had to manage its own departmental budget. I used to enter the budget numbers into the fancy software, but for the daily tracking my boss relied on Excel. I used it to create the yearly budget, track the accounts, manage the money coming in and out and eventually reconcile what we projected and what we actually spent at the end of the year. So don’t be afraid of Excel, and embrace it for even the most critical of tasks, your business budget.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to create your own yearly budgeting template. You can create it from scratch as I will show you or download the one we are creating and tweak it to your own needs. This will be the first in a series of four simple tutorials. The following three tutorials will work simultaneously with the yearly budget workbook. The second upcoming tutorial will show you how create a monthly expense template, and the third and fourth tutorials will show you how to reconcile the income with expenses and how to use this data to create cool graphics and charts that will help you better manage and utilize the money your business makes.

First, you need to write down a cash figure for each of the following categories. In this tutorial, I am going to work with a small fictitious online company that provides SEO services – Search Engine Optimization.

Yearly Expenses

• Salaries and Wages
• Marketing/Advertising
• Taxes
• Insurance
• Rent & Maintenance
• Utilities
• Telephone
• Office Supplies
• Equipment Purchases
• Travel & Entertainment
• Shipping/Postage
• Accounting Fees
• Legal Fees
• Other/Miscellaneous

Once you have a dollar amount for each of the categories, you can begin creating your simple one page yearly budget for your small business. Please remember I am using Microsoft Excel 2007 for this tutorial, so if you are using a previous version, the main categories and drop down menus will be different.

Step 1. Open Microsoft Excel 2007, go to the start button and select new, click on “blank workbook” and select “Create.”

Step 2. Enter the name of your company in cell A1, in this example I enter the name “Web2Hits” for my search engine optimization company. Next select cells A1 through D1, right click and go down to “format cells” using the drop down short cut menu. Go to “Alignment” and select “center” under “Horizontal” alignment. Next, go down and click on “merge cells” under “text control”. Next go to “Font” and select the font, font style, font size and font color that you would like for your company name title.

Step 3. Next in cell A3 write “Yearly Expenses” in bold, and in B3 write “Budgeted” in bold. Next enter the yearly expenses categories in cells A4 through A17.

Step 4. In cell A18, write “Total=” in bold. Next, enter dollar amounts under the “Budgeted” column and next to the appropriate category. For my fictitious company, it looks like this:

Step 5. Now select cells B4 through B17. Next, click on the “Formula” top menu and select “AutoSum” and the total sum of cells B4 through B17 will appear in cell B18. You may now select cells A18 and B18 and format it as you please. In my case, I made the text and dollar figure bold and change the shading of the cells to a darker tone to make it stand out.

Step 6. Now for the fun part, you are going to add a chart to your one page view of your business yearly budget so you can see in color where you have allocated your money. Now every time you need to take a quick look at your yearly budget numbers you can easily get all the information in one page and see it broken down in percentages and color. Now, go to the “Insert” menu and click on “Pie” chart and select the second pie chart under 2-D option. Next click on “Select Data,” and in the Select Data Source menu, select cells A4 through A18 and cells B4 through cells B17, and click ok.

Step 7. Finally, select the chart, and click on “Chart Layout” and select chart layout number six. You can add a title to the chart and click on it and enlarge it if you want it to look bigger when you print it. Finally click on the chart and drag it, and place it right under the “Totals” cell. Now, save it and go to Print, select Print preview and print it, it should look something like this.

Go to part 2>>

You can also download the small business budget series templates.