How to create a business budget
I am a big believer in budgets. These excel spreadsheet-wonders have helped me track my personal spending and ensure that I am saving. But if you are an entrepreneur or a small business owner, budgets and cloud based financial planning tools are key to determining your monthly financial projects, and help to keep your eye on cash flow, streamline budgeting, effectively forecast and prepare for the future.
Key factors to look for when rolling out a business budget are:
Ability to build the budget yourself
Ability to automatically integrate key calculations needed, ie: sales tax, income tax, etc.
Help to manage financial projections
Integrate with your historical financial data
Ability to create scenarios for budgeting and revenue projections
Having the right budgeting tool can help you make decisions based on accurate financial information. With so many solutions on the market, I did quite a bit of research, spoke with several small business owners and compiled the following short list.
3 companies who have great budget platforms
#1 Adaptive Planning
Part of the Workday group, Adaptive Planning is a scalable modeling budgeting tool that helps business owners to forecast, model, collaborate and drive reporting.
Top 5 features Features:
1 Budgeting & Forecasting,
2. What-if Scenario Planning,
3. Reporting & Analytics
4. Excel Interface for Planning
5. OfficeConnect to streamline reporting from Microsoft Office
How this solutions benefits small businesses: Workday Adaptive Planning is an easy-to-use planning platform that helps organizations to collaborate, gain business insights, and adapt.
The budgeting and cloud-based financial planning software allows teams to create their own models and plans, which link together, and provide a comprehensive view across an organization.
The platform’s embedded reporting and analytics, allows teams to monitor and analyze performance, test scenarios for course correction to achieve goals, and report results to internal and external stakeholders.
How easy is it to use this solution: Workday Adaptive Planning has and Excel interface to help customers seamlessly transition to Workday Adaptive Planning.
Pricing : annual subscription
Free Demo: : https://www.adaptiveplanning.com/demo/enterprise-planning-cloud
Availability – Available now
Number of seats -- Unlimited
Languages -- English, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Japanese, German, Swedish, Dutch
#2 Budgeto
Launched in 2012, Budgeto is a platform that allows small and medium sized businesses/entrepreneurs to develop, manage and share business budgets with little or no accounting knowledge.
Its fully automated interface makes it possible to prepare, share and work multi-scenario business budgets without any accounting knowledge.
Budgeto is also connected with QuickBooks Online (QBO) so the business owner can not only build a budget, but also easily maintain their projections by automatically importing historical data from their bookkeeping software.
Key features:
Automatic set up for your business from anywhere in the world. This set up includes the following modules:
o Income taxes
o Sales tax
o Employer contribution rates
o Deprecation rules
Simple to use
o Easily create the budget by filing out a form
o Each time a form is completed, Budgeto automatically performs all of the calculations and completes financial projections, including profit & loss statements, cash flow statements, balance sheets and financial ratios
Quick Books integration
o Owners are also able to sync Budgeto with Quick Books accounts to review and adjust the monthly budget
Free Trial – Yes , there is a 14-day free trial
Download here: http://support.budgeto.com/en/support/solutions/articles/14000097394-budgeto-14-day-free-trial
Pricing; Ranges between $15 - $45 per month, per company
Number of users: 1000+
#3 idusoft
IDU Public Cloud is a Microsoft.NET web application based on ASP.NET using Microsoft SQL Server and has a browser based interface.
Key features of the solution include:
Solution is available in 3 formats
o Light, Sand Enterprise
Compatibility
o IDU Cloud is fully compatible across all modern web browsers including Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer. No additional plug-in’s or add-on’s are necessary.
o Access iIDU-Concept from any device including smart phones, tablets, laptops and desk top computers.
Easy data integration
o Easily import data into the IDU-Concept from Excel of text files
Infrastructure
o IDU can be used on premise, or in a private cloud
Number of users: 1000+
Free trial: no
Getting a full view of your business budget is essential to managing a business. Let me know what on premise or cloud-based budgeting solution you use and share your experiences below.