Business expenses come even before you earn your first dollar. This is the first business consideration you have to thoroughly think about before you begin promoting your business, the expenses necessary to operate your business.
While it is true that you have to think of business expense ahead of everything and therefore budget for it in advance, this is an ongoing process you have to include in your operations.
You may set up an Expense Budget for a month, a quarter or annual. You have to ensure that you are able to budget it well to ensure that your business operations is directed into ensuring return on investment in every business endeavor you make.
Because of this, you have to create an Expense Budget and monitor it well. To help you, Excel has an Expense Budget Template you can take advantage of.
You may create your own template complete with logo and color scheme of your company but to start the process, you can download the Excel Expense Budget Template to have an idea of the important details necessary for this budgeting process.
What are the details necessary for the Expense Budget Template?
Expense budgets contain two important sections: Personnel Section and Operating Section.
In the Personnel Expense Budget Section include the salaries for the following:
- Office Personnel
- Store Personnel
- Sales People
- Other personnel necessary in the operations.
Ideally, you budget expenses for a quarter in the personnel expense budget. This is for the first three months of operations where you are not expecting profits to come in as yet.
You may have receivables during the first few months of operations but they may need to be earmarked for other operating expenses and thus your budget needs to be sufficient for the first quarter.
Even if you are budgeting for the year and is already in full operations budgeting for three months is still a good rule of thumb.
If you are already comfortable with your budgeting and timing of receivables, only then can you budget two months for personnel expense budget.
In the Operating Expense Budget Section otherwise called OPEX, the details you may include are the following:
- Advertising Costs
- Delivery Costs
- Other Employee Benefits
- Insurance
- Interests
- Office Supplies
- Postage
- Maintenance and repairs
- Telephone and other utilities
- Rent and mortgage
- Taxes
There are other operating expenses you encounter and you have to put all of them in the template. Budgeting on a per period basis is likewise necessary herewith. If you are already in operation for a while, you must review the average periodical expenses and budget for operating expenses accordingly.
Based on your average monthly or quarterly operating expenses, budget two period when necessary. If this is not possible, use the average based on the past 3 months or three quarters. Ensure that you pickup the highest period cost to ensure that your budgeting is enough to cover any spike on your costs.
Another important item in the Expense Budget Template is the actual based on the period of your budgeting.
By reviewing the budget against the actual expense you are able to see the accuracy of your budgeting and thus will be able to cover all expenses necessary for the business operations without delay.
You may have a printer create an Expense Budget sheet but an electronic monitoring may likewise be necessary. If you keep your expense budget template on your computer, you will easily review them and analyze them properly.