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The Benefits of Budgeting with Budget Templates Part 2


This article focuses on part two of the importance of budget templates series.

In part 1 of the series of The Benefits of Budgeting with Budget Templates, it is mentioned that budgeting is a topic that is not very popular in many companies, and the process may seem like a headache to many employees. Although a pain, it is necessary to communicate the importance of a budget to the entire company so the employees take ownership of it. In this article, we will continue the discussion of the benefits of budget templates.

We’ve talked about assumptions templates, capital expenditures templates and more to help organize your budget. Another template that is typically used across most companies is an expense budget, which allows for input for accounts that have not been budgeted already through other templates like personnel and capital. There are several ways of handling other expenses, and below are a few recommendations to make the input more accurate and efficient:

1. Show prior year actual and forecast by account. This allows users to

simply compare to the prior year and confidently make sure that they

are not under or over budget for each account.

2. Allow users to enter detail for each account. For instance, marketing

expenses will be beneficial to know what makes up the monthly amount

rather than having employees keep this information separately.

3. Show the accounts that were budgeted in other templates, but lock

these accounts down so that the values cannot be modified.

Keep in mind that revenue and cost of sales is specific to each industry; therefore, these templates will be discussed in the industry section. Revenue and cost of sales can be budgeted in a similar template to the expense template above, but many times companies want to get much more detailed. Other templates that can be used are a balance sheet, a travel template, or a budget by project.

Industry

There may be templates that are more specific to the industry or built towards the particular specifications of the organization. Typically these templates will be the revenue and cost of sales templates. There are probably many templates that are being used today, but it is important to try to use only a handful of templates that can be designed and used across the entire company. Also, it is good practice to create templates that will auto-calculate many of the revenue accounts and cost of sales accounts.

A public sector expenditures template is available after the departmental manager has input his/her adjustments and comments. The baseline budget and the departmental adjustments calculate the departmental requested amount. Then the other offices, such as the budget office, the executive team, and the board can add or subtract adjustments to the departmental total to determine the final amount, which is the Board Requested amount. Also, each inputter has the ability to add comments.

The retail revenue sample allows users to input unit count by product, which calculates revenue by multiplying the count by the price per unit. Each month can be expanded to show the individual weeks, which is where the input is allowed, while the other months are minimized in the example.

The final industry template is a commission template which calculates the monthly salary and commission by employee. The template can include employee termination as well.