For small business owners and entrepreneurs
Budget calculator for business owners using spreadsheet.
As an entrepreneur or a small business owner, you can create a simple personal budget calculator to help your financial planning.
This article explains the important columns and what they represent to help you in preparing your own spreadsheet calculator.
The use of a personal budget calculator
A personal budget calculator helps you to track your income and spendings. You may need it for personal reference.
In addition, a funder or an investor giving you a start-up loan could use part of this information to determine whether or not you’ll be able to meet your start-up loan repayments.
Therefore, as a small business owner if you ever need to borrow funds, you’ll need to show that your average monthly income minus costs and expenses are such that you’re not overspending.
Otherwise, you could be taking out of the money meant for the business and that is not a good sign.
Therefore, with a personal budget calculator, you can easily keep track of your personal income and expenditure.
Watch the tutorial here:
How to create a personal budget calculator from scratch
The first thing you need to do to create a personal budget calculator from scratch is to open a blank spreadsheet.
Create a personal income section in a budget calculator
In order to create the personal income section, you’ll need to add the following four columns:
a. Personal income column
Under this column is where you list all of the sources of personal income you earn in a month. For example:
- Salary from an employer
- Other income
The number of items under this column will depend on your personal situation.
If you need more rows just insert and add as many as you need.
b. Notes
Add a brief description for any items to help someone else understand each source of income. For example under income you can make a note that the income is from contributions.
c. Monthly net income
Include the value for each item under this column. For this column, you can rely on your bank statements to get an average of last three months for the items that are not recurring.
Your net monthly income is the final amount you get from each item less any deductions.
For example the net income from your salary is your ‘take home pay’.
d. Annual net income
In this column, you’ll need to include a formula – each monthly net income multiplied by 12.
For example, the annual net income for ‘salary from employer’ is calculated by the formula =C2*12.
Click on the cell and drag down the plus sign for the rest of the items.
That is, annual net income would be calculated automatically for you by multiplying your anticipated monthly income by 12.
Add the annual net income (use = SUM ()) to give the annual total income from all sources.
Create a personal expense section in a personal budget calculator
Copy and paste the entire personal income section a few lines away to create the personal expenses section and edit the columns.
Change the columns to:
a. Personal expenses
The items you list under this section are the expenses you personally incur in a typical month. That is, the money you personally spend each month.
For example, if you share the rent or utilities payments with your other then you only need to include the amount that you pay – not the whole rent owed on the property.
Other items you can have under personal expenses are personal loan repayments, utilities bills, childcare or school fees, personal savings or monthly grocery bill etc.
Just like in the personal income section, the number of items you include will depend on your personal situation.
b. Notes
Add a brief description for any items to help some else understand each of the expenses you list.
c. Monthly expenses
This is the value of each personal expense item in your budget.
d. Annual expenses
If you are using the template this is auto-calculated. However, you can get the annual expenses by multiplying your anticipated monthly expenses by 12.
If you copied and pasted from the income section, the formula is the same i.e. monthly expense cell multiplied by 12 i.e. C2*12.
Click on the cell and drag down the plus sign for the rest of the items.
Monthly balance
If your personal expenses are greater than your personal income each month then, this figure is negative (in deficit).
It means that your business will need to bring in sufficient income to help you cover these costs.
This might imply that you’ll need to spend part of the money meant for your business to cover your personal costs.
Therefore, in your Cash Flow forecast your salary will be zero.
Otherwise, if you are earning more income than you are generating costs, the figure is positive (in surplus).
This means that any money you take from your business as a salary will be a bonus.
You don’t need make any changes to this column and any column in yellow because these figures will auto-populate.
Annual balance
The annual balance is the remaining balance after you remove all your total expenses from all areas from your total income from all sources.
You may not need this figure for anything other than for reference.
The annual figure will not be used in your Cash Flow Forecast.
Conclusion
You can watch the tutorial video on how to make a simple personal budget calculator using a spreadsheet below.
Otherwise, you can download the free template here.
