Small Business Budget Template for Excel and Google Sheets

Quick Answer: A small business budget template needs three tabs: a monthly plan (revenue forecast, cost of goods, fixed and variable operating costs, net), a transactions tab holding your categorized bank statement lines, and a budget-versus-actual tab that totals those lines with SUMIFS and shows the variance. Build it once in Excel or Google Sheets with the formulas below, then set next year's numbers from last year's statements.

A budget is a forecast you hold yourself to: what you expect to earn and spend each month, written down before the month starts, then compared with what actually happened. The comparison is the useful part. A template that only plans, with no actuals feeding into it, gets abandoned by March. This layout connects the plan to your real bank and card activity.

What goes in a small business budget?

Group the lines the way your accountant's profit and loss does, so the budget and the books speak the same language. For most small businesses:

• Revenue, split by your main income streams (product sales, services, retainers, subscriptions).
• Cost of goods sold: materials, inventory purchases, contractor labor directly tied to sales, payment processing fees.
• Fixed operating costs: rent, insurance, salaries, loan payments, software subscriptions, accounting fees.
• Variable operating costs: marketing, travel, shipping, utilities that swing with activity.
• Office expenses: supplies, printing, postage, small equipment, cleaning, coffee and kitchen supplies. Many "monthly office expenses sheet" searches are really looking for this one block; keep it as its own group so it can be watched.
• Owner draws and taxes: estimated tax payments and owner pay, which are not expenses on the P&L for some entity types but are real cash leaving the account.

Use the same category names as your chart of accounts. If you do not have one yet, the chart of accounts guide has a small-business starting list.

The three tabs

Keep a column A on Plan and Actual vs Budget with the category name and a column B with its type ("Income" or "Expense"). The formulas key off both.

Plan tab formulas

Revenue lines are where forecasting happens; the rest is mostly copying known costs.

• Flat fixed cost (rent, insurance): type it in January, then in February (D5) enter =C5 and fill right.
• Growth on a revenue line: if January is in C4 and you expect 2% a month, put =C4*1.02 in D4 and fill right. Keep the 2% in its own cell, say $P$1, so the formula is =C4*(1+$P$1).
• Variable cost tied to revenue: for processing fees around 3% of sales, =C$4*0.03. Cost of goods at 35% of product sales: =C$4*0.35.
• Totals: for revenue, =SUM(C4:C6); for expenses, the same over each group; net = total revenue minus total expenses.
• Annual column: =SUM(C4:N4) on each row.

Do not budget to the cent. Round to the nearest $50 or $100; precision you do not have only hides the assumptions.

How do you pull actual spending from bank statements into the template?

Each month, download the statements for every business bank and card account. Most banks offer a CSV export for recent activity; for PDF-only months, QuickBankConvert converts the statement to Excel or CSV with one row per transaction and money out as negative amounts. The PDF to Excel format guide shows what the columns look like.

Paste the rows into the Transactions tab and fill the Category column. Then on Actual vs Budget, with the first day of each month in row 2 (for example 1/1/2026 in C2), the actual for the category in A5 is:

=ABS(SUMIFS(Transactions!$C:$C,
  Transactions!$D:$D,$A5,
  Transactions!$A:$A,">="&C$2,
  Transactions!$A:$A,"<="&EOMONTH(C$2,0)))

SUMIFS adds the amounts that match every condition: the category, and a date between the first and last day of the month. Microsoft documents the argument order in its SUMIFS function reference; Google Sheets uses the same order. ABS turns negative money-out amounts positive so expenses compare with a positive budget.

If you would rather keep income and expenses signed, drop ABS and enter expense budgets as negatives. Either works; mixing the two does not.

Variance formulas

Make every variance read the same way: positive is good news.

• Variance: =IF($B5="Income",D5-C5,C5-D5) where C is Budget and D is Actual. More revenue than planned is positive; less spending than planned is positive.
• Variance %: =IF(C5=0,"",E5/C5), formatted as a percentage.
• Flag: conditional formatting that shades Variance % red below -10% helps you spot what needs a look without reading every row.

Worked example: one month at a small studio

A two-person design studio budgets March like this. The actuals come from its checking account and business card, categorized on the Transactions tab.

Read it top down. Revenue came in 10% short, which explains most of the gap. Contractors cost less, partly because there was less client work. Software ran over by $180: a quick filter on the Transactions tab for that category will show whether a new tool was added or an annual renewal hit. Office expenses ran over by $115. The net variance, -$1,245, equals the sum of the line variances, which is a useful check that no category was missed.

How do you set next year's budget from last year's statements?

Start from what happened, not from what you hope:

1. Total last year by category and month. Load the twelve months of statements into the Transactions tab and use the same SUMIFS layout with last year's dates. This is also a quick reconciliation: the totals should be close to your profit and loss.
2. Find the seasonal pattern. For each revenue month, =C4/$O4 gives its share of the year (O is the annual total). A business that earns 14% of its revenue in December should not budget December as one twelfth.
3. Set the annual targets. Decide revenue growth and known cost changes (a rent increase, a new hire) at the annual level first.
4. Spread them back to months. Next year's month = annual target × last year's share for that month, for example =$P$4*C20 where C20 holds the share.
5. Add one-off items by hand. Equipment purchases, an annual insurance premium, a trade show.

For a fuller look at where last year's cash went, cash flow analysis from bank statements builds the inflow and outflow view the budget is based on.

Excel or Google Sheets?

The formulas above work in both without changes. Pick by how you work:

• Excel suits you if your accountant sends and receives .xlsx files, or you want Power Query to append each month's export automatically.
• Google Sheets suits two people editing the same budget, and it keeps version history by default. Google's SUMIFS help page covers the Sheets syntax if you want to check it.

Either way, protect the Plan tab once it is agreed, so the only cells that change month to month are the transactions.

Related guides

• Small business spreadsheet for income and expenses
• Bookkeeping spreadsheet template
• Marketing budget template