Top Excel Budget Templates

We’ve provided you with the best free budget template selection around, whether you’re managing a personal budget, an industry-specific budget, or balancing a household budget. Additionally, we’ve provided details on how to choose the right budget for your use case, and steps on how to create one.

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By Andy Marker | April 17, 2020

Excel Business Budget Template

Track and manage your business expenses so you can make the best strategic decisions for your company with this business budget template. Gain visibility into where you’re overspending, where you need to cutback, and the general health of your company.

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Smartsheet business budget template dashboard sheet report

Smartsheet Business Budget Template

Smartsheet templates go beyond just a static spreadsheet and provide everything you need in one place.

  • Track monthly actuals against budget goals by department
  • Receive automated budget and spend approval requests
  • See a real-time overview of your financial health in the dashboard

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Department Budget

Estimate your department expenses for the upcoming fiscal year, track spend against savings, and compare year-over-year budget numbers by percent changes with this template designed for teams and departments.

Project Budget

Using this template will help you stay on top of your project budget. Track the material, labor, and fixed costs associated with each project task, and monitor the variance between your actual and budgeted amounts.

Home Construction Budget

Keep an eye on all construction-related expenses, including remodeling, planned improvements, emergency repairs, and labor and material budgets, and monitor the running balance.

Business Budget Management Template Set 

This set of templates in Smartsheet helps track monthly actuals against budget goals so you can tightly manage your financial performance and ensure your business stay on track.

  • Track monthly actuals against budget goals by department
  • Receive automated budget and spend approval requests
  • See a real-time dashboard view of financial health
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Simple Budget

List your income and expenses, calculate spend and savings totals, and view which portion of income is going to which category of expenses to stay on top of your budget and ensure you don’t go over.

Personal Budget

Document, track, and manage your personal income, expenses, and savings to ensure you’re moving towards your financial goals. Improve visibility into how well you save your money so you can reach your goals faster.

Household Expenses Monthly Budget

Track, manage, and organize expenses for an entire household on a month-to-month basis, create line items for recurring expenses, and boost savings so you can reach your financial goals faster.

Weekly Budget Planner

Track your income and expenses on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to gain better insight into where you’re spending the most money and identify areas where you can save. Add additional columns and update your spending goals as time goes on.

Money Manager

Track expenses and manage your budget in one location with this money manager template. With a yearly budget, a monthly budget report, and a transaction history log, you will have one comprehensive budgeting solution in one location to track expenses and income appropriately.

Zero-Based Budget

Allocate every dollar of your income to a piece of your budget to better track where your money is going and ensure the difference between your monthly income and expenses equal zero. Document both incoming money and outgoing expenses and adjust allocations accordingly.

GLBL Budget

Manage your budget every paycheck and ensure you’re allocating every dollar of income toward an outgo, resulting in a zero balance. Reduce the possibility of overspending by tracking transactions and assessing incoming and outgoing money on a regular basis.

College Budget

Create a budget to help you save money, balance expenses, and manage student loan payments while you’re in college. Track all income and expenses on a quarterly basis and estimate monthly college expense totals to ensure you are always on top of your money.

Academic Club Budget

Track fundraising efforts, document sponsorship amounts, and manage expenses to ensure the operations and strategies of your academic club run smoothly with this comprehensive template. Gain insight into budget versus actual balances and better manage club revenue.

Wedding Budget

Plan how much money you need to save for your wedding, surface all applicable expenses, estimate overall costs, and establish a baseline spend goal. As you start planning, track actual spend amounts to determine the variance to budget to ensure you remain within the bounds of your ideal spending goal.

Early Retirement Budget

Ensure that you’re saving enough money to live comfortably in retirement by creating a comprehensive plan, estimating your daily needs and expenses, and documenting how you will allocate your income. Gain insight into your income and expenses and estimate your budget with inflation factored in to make sure you’re covering all your bases.

Holiday Shopping Budget

To prepare for the holidays, list all gifts to purchase for whom, document how much each will cost, and compare that against a monthly or yearly budget to ensure you have visibility into how much money you are spending during the hectic holiday months.

Finding the right template can help you get started planning your budget, but you should also look for a solution to ensure your finance operations are as efficient as possible. Consider a tool that provides one location for your team to track and manage financial details, from anywhere, in real time.

Smartsheet is an enterprise work execution platform that is fundamentally changing the way businesses and teams work. Use Smartsheet to boost visibility into your finance operations. Make real-time updates and share details with key stakeholders to increase transparency and accountability. Ensure that everyone is working with the most up-to-date information, so that no detail is missed and you are able to make the right decisions at the right time.

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The Importance of a Personal Budget

Creating a personal budget is not only important for your financial well-being and peace-of-mind, but also for your short and long-term goals. Taking control of your finances with a personal budget template will help you make headway on these goals. 

To get started, you want to consider the following steps to help you establish your personal budget:

  • Set your goals. Take some time to make a list of your short and long-term goals. Determine why each goal is a priority, how you plan to achieve them, and the timeframe in which you would like to accomplish them. Short-term goals should only take a year to accomplish and would include items like paying off a credit card. Your long-term goals could take many years to accomplish, with examples of long-term goals including saving for your child’s education or your own retirement.
  • Track your spending. To make accurate estimates of how much you should allocate to each expense within your personal budget, you will need a sense of how much you are currently spending in each area. Review your bank statements for the last three to four months to get an idea of your spending. Of course, you may decide to change the amount you budget for each item, but this will at least provide a baseline to go off of.
  • Personalize your budget. Using a personal budget template is helpful to get your budget started, though you can always personalize your budget to match your specific needs. Additionally, just because you create a budget one month, doesn’t mean your expenses and goals will be the same for the next. Be sure to have monthly check-ins on your budget and don’t hesitate to update it as your circumstances change.

Getting Started With a Personal Budget Template in Excel

Now that you’ve made a list of your goals and started tracking your expenses, you can begin creating your actual budget using a personal budget template. 

Begin by downloading the personal budget template, and inputting your income, savings goals, and expense amounts for the first month. This template is made up of two sheets, one for your budget breakdown and the second is your dashboard. 
 

 

personal budget template

 

Within the first sheet, you will find three sections, including income, savings and expenses. The categories of the income section are:

  • Salary/Wages
  • Interest Income
  • Dividends
  • Refunds/Reimbursements
  • Business
  • Pension 
  • Misc

 

 

personal budget template

The next section is where you will input your savings goals. These goals may include both your short-term and long-term savings goals that you listed earlier. This section includes the following categories, but can be changed to fit your goals:

  • Emergency Fund
  • Transfer to Savings
  • Retirement (401K, IRA)
  • Investments
  • Education
  • Other

 

personal budget template

The last section of the personal budget sheet is for expenses. This section has various primary categories, with multiple sub-categories associated. The primary expense categories include:

  • Home
  • Transportation
  • Daily Living
  • Entertainment
  • Health
  • Vacation/Holiday

 

personal budget template

Once you have input the individual amounts for each of the income, savings, and expense categories, you will see that the total for each month is calculated at the bottom of each column. Additionally, totals are calculated at the end of each row, representing your year-to-date total for each budget item, category and section. 

On the second sheet you will find your budget dashboards. Dashboards are helpful to provide a quick visual into the summary and health of your budget, and will automatically update as you make changes to your personal budget sheet. The dashboard sheet included in this personal budget template has the following four distributions:

  • Potential to Save Summary This summary calculates your potential savings, on a monthly basis, after you have met your current savings goals for the expenses incurred. The potential to save amount is calculated by subtracting the Total Savings and Total Expense amounts from Total Income.

 

​personal budget potential to save


 

  • Income to Expenses Chart The bar chart provides a quick look at the difference between your total income and expenses on a monthly basis, which is helpful to provide a high-level view of the health of your budget.
     

 

personal budget template bar chart
  • Income-Expense-Savings Pie This pie chart is helpful to determine the breakdown of your budget, providing a visual of what proportion of your budget goes to income, savings, and expenses.

 

personal budget template pie chart

Use a pre-built Smartsheet template to create a business budget in minutes.

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