In business, several activities help with financial forecasting and management.
One of these is your monthly budget.
A yearly budget can offer a practical overview of your business’s spending and revenue.
But, considering that 56% of small business owners have had to adjust prices to combat financial challenges, monthly budgets become crucial. It allows businesses to respond to changing circumstances in real time, such as rising costs or unexpected dips in revenue.
It’s clear that budgeting for success requires consistent planning and analysis; that’s why it’s crucial to have the essential tools. Start with a budget template to help you set monthly budgets quickly and effectively.
This guide shares 14 monthly budget templates you can use immediately. Plus, easy-to-follow instructions on creating your own template with Visme’s document and data visualization editor.
Eager to get started on your budget right away? We've got you covered with dozens of free budget templates to choose from. Short on time? No worries. Visme's AI design generator can help you create professional, polished budgets in just minutes.
To be truly successful with monthly planning, saving time is vital. Customizable budget templates are the ideal tool to help you achieve this objective.
Even if you're looking to draft a proposal, budget proposal templates also come in handy as well.
Here is a list of ready-to-use monthly templates to incorporate into your financial planning strategies.
Remember, with Visme, it’s easy to turn your monthly budget template from Google Sheets into a branded, dynamic, and reusable document.
If you’re looking for a free monthly budget template you can use for your small business, this template is a great option. It consists of three pages with pre-filled tables highlighting operating expenses and cash flows. The design includes a visual bottom bar you can easily customize with your brand colors.
Create a branded budget using this template by leveraging Visme’s Brand Wizard. Input your website URL into the wizard’s interface, and follow the steps to build a reusable brand kit. Once completed, use it for monthly budgets or any other project.
Monthly budgets help you compare financial fluctuations from month to month. A monthly budget with a comparison table helps you track cash flow and spending habits. This makes it easy to identify financial trends and income fluctuations.
Implement this template into your budgetary planning and start comparing your monthly budgets. Then, optimize the analysis framework with Visme’s Dynamic Fields, and add a field for each month’s budget details in their relevant table cell. This way, the data is usable throughout other budget documents while staying current across all.
For example, this template uses dynamic fields for the current budget as follows:
It also uses dynamic fields for the previous budget:
Sometimes, you only need a simple monthly budget template, which you can keep as a blank document and fill in every month. In that case, this three-page template is an ideal option.
It consists of a section where you annotate an income/budget overview, another for setting budget goals and two empty lists for fixed and other expenses.
The template’s layout is ideal for handwritten monthly budgets. So, if you prefer organizing their finances by hand before inputting them into detailed spreadsheets, this is the template for you.
Customize the colors and design as much or as little as you want, and print it on recycled paper. Make copies to use every month and feel confident with your budgeting activities.
Nonprofits use monthly budgets to manage finances effectively, ensuring they allocate resources in alignment with their mission and goals. Budgets record how the nonprofit uses funds, which is essential for maintaining transparency with donors, stakeholders and regulatory bodies.
This two-page template helps with those objectives. Its design highlights two lists: First, a revenue list consisting of sales, corporate donations and fundraisers. Second is the list of operating expenses, such as staff salaries, rent, equipment, meetings, travel and legal and accounting costs.
The alternating color rows make reviewing and analyzing your budget easy and fuss-free. Customize these colors easily by changing the table settings. When you finish this template for the month, save it as a content block and insert it into your monthly plan or proposal like the one below:
A personal monthly budget template provides a structured way to manage your finances, track your income and expenses and plan for future financial goals.
When you budget monthly, it’s easier to allocate funds for savings and plan for regular debt payments. It can even reduce financial stress, helping you feel more in control.
Now, take this template and turn it into your monthly budget helper. On the first page, set an income overview, and subtract the fixed deductions that give a net income value. Then, on the following pages, list your expenses, savings and investments while doing the math to calculate your remaining funds.
Your monthly marketing budget is an essential part of your business. It ensures you allocate financial resources effectively across several categories, helping you optimize the impact of your marketing efforts.
This template is one of the many great one pager examples for sharing data in a simplified way. You can use it to organize your budget into expense categories such as digital advertising, content marketing, SEO and SEM, influencer marketing, events and sponsorships, and miscellaneous.
Calculate the allocation by percentage and then add the total budget per item. You’ll need to have the total budget value ready at the start, so you can calculate the percentages accordingly.
This monthly budget template is the ideal companion to a master budget that oversees all departments for your business or aspect of your project. For example, the one below shares an overview of a complete project budget.
Use this template to keep track of your retail store’s fixed monthly expenses, such as rent, utilities, wages, maintenance, cleaning and banking. It offers a bird’s eye view of monthly costs and helps you keep track of any variations.
Ideally, include this page in your business plan, so all stakeholders are aware of monthly operating expenses ahead of time. First, customize the template to match your brand and reflect your business costs. Then, when it’s finished, save the entire design as a content block.
Open your business plan document and add a new page. Navigate to your content library and click on the budget you saved. The content block will appear automatically in your canvas. Now, you can customize any aspect to match the rest of the business plan document. Here’s a business plan template you can use right away:
Your small business’s HR department needs a monthly budget planner template to help get your finances in order. This one-page design is the ideal quick calculation document where you can set financial goals and calculate expenses.
Customize the template from inside Visme’s design editor, or print it out and use it in your binder. Once inside the editor, you can personalize the layout, colors and fonts to suit your brand or visual style.
Monthly budget reports are crucial parts of the puzzle when calculating expenses and investments to grow your business. This template will help you set up a monthly report highlighting what was spent vs. what was budgeted.
The pages include a quick overview of the month’s financial status, bar graphs depicting expenditures of different aspects and a conclusion to set the scene for the next month.
If you need help writing these text snippets, summarizing longer text or proofreading the content for your budget report, use Visme’s AI Writer. It’s available in every text box. Just write a prompt, AI will follow your instructions.
This budget report isn’t the only template, nor is the AI Writer the only AI tool available in Visme. Using the AI Report Writer, you can generate ready-to-finalize reports to create comprehensive budget reports. From the Visme dashboard, click Create New > Generate with AI, and write a prompt describing your budget report. The chatbot will suggest a few style options, so you can choose one and generate your document.
This budget template uses the half-donut chart to highlight four aspects of a marketing budget: online advertising, conventions, print advertising and sales training. Use this infographic visualization for the opening page of your marketing budget report or the marketing section of your master budget.
Use this monthly percentage calculation to analyze if the values should stay the same or if there’s room for adjustment. Create a monthly version to compare how the budget changes and adjusts to your business needs.
This printable monthly budget template is ideal for calculating your finances every month. The empty spaces at the top highlight the month’s opening and closing balances.
Then, there are three tables for inputting your income, savings and expenses. The income and savings tables include description and amount columns to fill in effortlessly. Expenses are listed as rent, gas, electricity, internet, food, etc., but are easy to customize to fit your needs.
Finally, there’s a space for notes and another for money goals, where you add essential information about the month’s budget and how you expect to manage it.
This presentation template addresses the budget spent for one quarter, where you analyze how the marketing department spent money over three months.
Use the sleek tables to compare budget categories such as design, management, analytics, automation and webinars. Each column represents a month in the quarter and highlights the total spending for each category. Use the data to calculate how spending fluctuates from month to month.
A budget presentation like this one serves as a financial report to help stakeholders forecast for future quarters. Analyzing in retrospect also helps set financial goals and gain clear insight into where money is going and if it's being used to its best advantage.
For an optimized report, turn your budget presentation into an interactive experience that offers more information about the budget than a static design can provide. Use hotspots and popups to display relevant and critical information to help viewers better understand how the budget is being analyzed.
According to a Fed Small Business survey, 54% of small business owners say that uneven cash flow is their greatest financial challenge. This makes financial projections difficult to master. That’s why monthly budgets are an essential aspect of business administration. They help recalculate income and expenses regularly, so adjusting for uneven cash flow is simple.
This reusable budget worksheet template is easy to customize for each month’s varying cash flow and income. The top table is labeled for an operating income, and the second for non-operating income. The columns help you compare the actual value with the budget and highlight the difference.
The last monthly budget template on the list is a bit different from the others. This is a financial dashboard that showcases and helps analyze monthly operating expenses.
Instead of tables, the budget is separated into sections with labels and large numbers. Additionally, there’s a line graph visualizing employee expenses and two bar graphs visualizing rent and lease expenses, plus maintenance and repairs.
This template is customizable with Visme’s whiteboard, the ideal environment to collaborate with your team and maximize financial efficiency. Give everyone access to the whiteboard while on a virtual call or in the meeting room, and work together on your financial game plan.
As a business professional, it’s critical to grasp the importance of budgeting.
This insightful perspective by Eric Hempler, an expert in financial clarity, lays it out perfectly,
“Budgeting, more than a financial tool, is crucial for strategic planning, setting goals, making informed decisions, measuring performance, and managing risks. It's foundational for sustainable growth and business resilience.”
That being said, you'll need more than a template to keep you on track. You’ll need healthy habits and practices.
Follow these best practices to create and maintain monthly budgets that help with all the points above.
Visme is the perfect platform for non-designers and seasoned professionals. It combines ease of use with dynamic design features that anyone can use.
With an easy-to-use editor, you can create a branded budget template that’s ready to personalize with updated information every month.
Follow the steps below to get started.
Sign in to your Visme dashboard first. If you don’t have an account for your team yet, open one right now and continue with the instructions.
Click “Create New” in the dashboard and choose how to create the budget template.
These are your options:
1. Navigate to the document templates, then into budgets. Browse the results until you find a monthly budget you like.
2. After signing in, open a budget template in this article, which will open automatically in the editor.
3. Use Visme’s AI Document Generator. Write a text prompt in the chatbot describing that you want a monthly budget for your business. The AI will offer several style options; choose one, and the tool will generate a design with content and visuals. Below is a video of how it works.
With a monthly budget template open, it’s time to add your financial data. Most budget templates available in the Visme gallery come fully equipped with a pre-filled table you can customize to suit your data values. Adding one is easy if your chosen template doesn’t have a table. They’re in the data tab on the editor’s left-hand toolbar.
To add your data to a table, connect it to your Google Sheet or Excel Spreadsheet. For optimal results, build your sheet with only the values you want to use in the template. If your sheet includes more data, clean it and create a new sheet with the desired values.
Aside from tables, use other data visualizations in your monthly budget templates to visualize different data sets. One option is a line graph, comparing your budgets over time or month to month. Another is a pie chart visualizing the percentages of the budget that are applied to particular aspects.
Below is a pie chart example visualizing a student budget:
The final step in creating a monthly budget for your business is to personalize the layout and brand the overall design. The goal is to make the monthly budget match your brand guidelines and align with your business communication documents.
Achieving this objective with Visme is easy. First, assess all icons and photos that are not relevant to your brand, replace them with new ones from Visme’s royalty-free asset library or upload your own.
Next, use your Brand Kit to update the colors in your brand palette and change the fonts to your default brand ones. If you don’t have a brand kit, open the Brand Wizard and insert your company’s URL into the form. Following the steps, you’ll have a brand kit set up quickly.
You’re now set up for success with a finished monthly budget template. At this point, you have several options for sharing and publishing the document. If you are working on the budget for your small business, you can print the budget template and keep it in your binder.
Another idea is to manage monthly budgets with your colleagues, invite them to your Visme workspace and assign them sections that pertain to their department or team. Adjust permissions so they can either collaborate in building the budget or only leave comments with feedback.
To share the budget with stakeholders, publish it privately and send a live Visme link they can view from any device. Use Visme’s analytics dashboard to see if they’ve opened the document yet.
Alternatively, download a PDF and send it as an attached document in an email or instant message.
For those of you with pressing questions about monthly budgets, this FAQ section will help clear doubts.
A monthly budget is a financial document outlining the expected monthly income and expenses. The goal of a monthly budget is to plan and calculate how much money you need to cover all month’s expenses with the available income.
Monthly budgets have several benefits, including the following:
Visme has numerous budget templates in different layouts and styles. Its template library has budget templates in different formats: plans, tables, charts, whiteboards and dashboards.
Maintaining a monthly budget helps you set financial goals, track spending habits and adjust your budget as needed. It’s a crucial part of any business because it helps manage cash flow, ensuring sufficient funds to cover operational costs and investments.
A reusable monthly budget template streamlines the budgeting process, saving time and ensuring consistency across financial periods. They also reinforce your company’s identity, promoting a professional image internally with your team and stakeholders.
With Visme the possibilities are endless, you can turn your Excel monthly budget template into a beautifully branded document you and your team can collaborate on monthly and more.
Create a team account and take advantage of all of Visme’s business design features to keep your finances in order with monthly budgets and other business needs.
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