Budget it template

Table of Contents. Business Plan Template Excel. Sign Up. Ideally, the process of developing your budget begins immediately after the previous budget is approved and leverages the past budget as a starting point. Monitor your spending against last year's budget, and as you see variances or ways to allocate funds more effectively, use them as input to an ongoing draft budget. Several months before your budget is due, review last year's budget and this year's expenses and identify areas that could be reduced or reallocated.

When you arrive at the budgeting cycle with activities already launched to reduce extra "fat," it will be easier to justify a budget that's optimized rather than larded up with unnecessary items. Some organizations demand more diligent defense of a budget than others. So if you work for an organization that demands justification of every line item, it's especially important to start selling your budget before you even write the first line, while communicating and gaining consensus for your IT strategy.

A massive IT project is more easily justified at budgeting time when everyone knows its purpose, impact, and objectives than if budget season is the first time anyone hears of it.

If you've gained agreement on your strategy, it's harder to simply dismiss budgetary categories or demand arbitrary reductions, since there should be a direct tie between the previously agreed strategic imperative and the budget item. When you must make cuts, a solid understanding of your priorities can help identify cuts that will have the least impact on the effectiveness of your strategic plan.

If you don't already have an IT strategy, use the budgeting period as an opportunity to craft a "light" strategy that's presented immediately before your budget. If you have a cohesive and well-conceived plan, the money to execute that plan is less likely to be questioned.

Finally, if you are required to make significant reductions in various areas of your budget, highlight the capabilities that will be affected by the cuts.

As you review the budget, remember that rather than just a pot of money for your department, it's a prioritization of initiatives and capabilities. Unless your organization is rife with unused capacity, a cut in one area will affect an element of your IT strategy, and there's no harm in collaborating with the approver to determine which capabilities should be cut first and how that will affect the overall organization.

The more closely you can map your budget to past results, the easier it is to justify future expenditures. Discover the secrets to IT leadership success with these tips on project management, budgets, and dealing with day-to-day challenges. Delivered Tuesdays and Thursdays. Patrick Gray works for a leading global professional services firm, where he helps companies rapidly invent and launch new businesses. What's the opportunity cost of spreadsheet budgeting?

No single source of truth Disparate spreadsheets feed errors into rolled-up plan. Email governance allows deviations from targets. Manual touch points compound errors. Unable to plan multi-year Capitalization and amortization formulas require excessive maintenance.

Single-year plans hide the full extent of contract spend commits. Known out year asset spend redundantly calculated every year. No version control Plan owners overwhelmed by approval requests. Low confidence in version accuracy drives budget padding. College monthly budget. Personal budget. Explore premium templates. Wedding budget tracker. Lawn and garden budget. Channel marketing budget. Event budget. Wedding expense budget. Easy monthly budget.