When we were writing the finance chapters in The Boss of You, more than once we wished we could ship our book with a little USB drive full of sample Excel spreadsheets. Then we realized that of course, we could simply post said spreadsheets on our website for everyone to use — that’s right, even people who didn’t want to buy our book could benefit from our spreadsheet mania.
This is the first of what we hope will be several downloadable tools that you can use to help calculate the various dollars-and-cents (or Euros, or whatever) financial scenarios that accompany the life of an entrepreneur. We hereby present our handy-dandy annual budget spreadsheet.
This is a simple spreadsheet, and it’s meant as a starting point: something you can customize to your heart’s content, to suit your particular business. It’ll help you calculate your costs on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. Please note: All numbers are sheer whimsy on our part — obviously your costs will vary, so by no means should you take these numbers as any kind of guide to what things ought to cost. We just wanted to give you something to start with.
We welcome your feedback, so if you have suggestions about how to make this a better tool, please leave a comment!
Oh, and you’re welcome to re-post this. Here’s the official copyright notice:
The Boss of You: Sample business budget by Lauren Bacon and Emira Mears is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
Yay, Creative Commons!
4 responses so far ↓
1 Tiara // Apr 21, 2008 at 5:59 pm
we wished we could ship our book with a little USB drive full of sample Excel spreadsheets.
Well why not? I was at Darren Hayes’s concert last year and part of the VIP package was a specially made USB stick with exclusive acoustic tracks from his last tour.
2 leah // Apr 22, 2008 at 1:41 pm
this is great! what do you mean by “retained earnings”?
3 Lauren // Apr 22, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Good question, Leah. “Retained earnings” are basically a budget line item for your profits. It’s a good idea to keep some money in the company, to pay for unplanned expenses and to provide a cushion for ongoing cashflow needs, raises, and the like — and if you factor profit into your budgets, it’s a lot easier to stay aware of your profitability. Make sense?
(P.S. We talk about all this budget stuff in much more detail in Chapter 3 of the book.)
4 Michele // May 8, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Thank You, Ms. Lauren & Ms. Emira:
I simply was looking for a budget spread sheet and recieved so much more. I said a prayer before logging on, God please I am at the crossroad in my life & starting all over after 28 yrs of marriage / partnership I did the work he controlled the money please don’t let this be complicated, Lord you know I love pretty & elegant. As I begin to surf I smiled & said honey you need a spreadsheet not pretty you are about to lose everything. I said ok God here I go & click on your website when the ws appeared on my screen I said Oh! my God this is a beautiful / pretty website with a wealth of knowledge alone with budget spreadsheets. God answered my prayer, your website is God sent thank you! I think I can muster up the strenght with God’s help and the knowledge He has placed in the both of you to impart in me while I am at this crossroad and in this season of my life. Wow ! I think I can start over again. Thank you again.
God Bless You!
Michele
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