10 Best Small Business Budget Templates for 2025
If you were to pay a $1000 fine for everytime you wonder where your money went, what's the sum you'd have spent by now? $5k? 10 grand? Only you know, but think about it.
A budget is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went, says Dave Ramsey. And creating one isn't difficult. All you need is a ready-made template. In this article, you'll get access to 10 best small business budget templates to cater for your expenditure and revenue tracking in 2025.
What makes a good business budget template?
Budgeting is an important process for every small business. How effectively the budgeting process is handled in an organization could define success or failure for the organisation.
A good business budget template serves as a comprehensive financial planning tool that helps organizations forecast, track, and manage their finances effectively throughout the fiscal year.
First and foremost, a good business budget template must be adaptable to different business sizes and types, from small startups to large enterprises, while maintaining clarity and usability for all stakeholders involved in financial planning.
In general, a good business budget template will include:
Income Projections: Detailed breakdown of expected revenue streams, including recurring revenue, one-time sales, and other income sources. This section should allow for monthly, quarterly, and annual projections.
Fixed Expenses: Regular, predictable costs like rent, salaries, insurance, loan payments, and subscriptions. These should be organized by department or category for better tracking.
Variable Expenses: Fluctuating costs such as utilities, supplies, raw materials, and commission-based payments. This section should include historical data to help predict future expenses.
Emergency Fund Allocation: Dedicated section for setting aside funds for unexpected expenses or opportunities, typically 3-6 months of operating expenses.
Cash Flow Management: Tools for tracking the timing of income and expenses to ensure adequate cash reserves throughout the year.
Budget vs. Actual Comparison: Side-by-side comparison of projected versus actual numbers, with variance analysis and adjustment capabilities.
Seasonal Considerations: Flexibility to account for business cyclicity, including peak seasons and slow periods that affect both income and expenses.
Growth Planning: Sections for capital expenditures, expansion costs, and investment in new equipment or technology.
Financial Goals Tracking: Integration of short-term and long-term financial objectives, with progress monitoring and milestone mark
Review of best 10 small business budget templates in 2025
Below is a list of 10 different budget templates for small business owners. Each template is differentiated to cater for one of the many key areas small businesses need to focus on. From a simple general template to templates around labour, payroll, marketing and sales budgets respectively.
1. Rows simple budget template
At Rows, we are committed to creating organized, detailed and tidy templates to help small business owners cater for their daily work activities. This one is no different. Our small business budget template helps you keep track of your income and expenses.
So, imagine how you can easily track all expenses in one place, set and stick to a budget and save time and reduce errors — that's what this template offers
And not just that, it goes beyond what other templates offer. Rows is a comprehensive tool of it's own as it offers:
Automatic live data aggregation from third-party sources. So, say you have a data source for collating budget data from, this template can easily connect with such sources and aggregate data.
AI Analyst: All Rows' templated spreadsheets features an AI analyst to help you get answers to related data questions.
Key components of Rows simple budget template
Pre-built categories: Includes common income streams and expense types for small businesses, like sales revenue, utilities, marketing, and payroll.
Automatic calculations: Totals, balances, and cash flow updates happen instantly, so you always know where you stand.
Customizable fields: Adapt the template to your unique business needs by renaming categories or adding new ones.
Simple and intuitive design: No steep learning curve—just plug in your numbers and start managing your finances.
How to get started with Rows simple budget template for small businesses?
To get started, all you need is:
Visit the template page: Click on “use template”.
Click “create spreadsheet” to open up a new page for budgeting purposes.
Add your data: Enter your current income and expenses to see where your business stands today
2. Labour budget template
This template provides a structured format for planning and monitoring labour expenses. This type of template focuses on staff scheduling and hours, department staffing budgeting needs, capacity planning, labour hours per unit produced and team composition planning. It breaks down employee costs into direct, indirect, fixed, and variable categories to clarify how your company allocates its resources
3. Payroll budget template
Payroll report templates make collecting employee information, creating schedules, calculating payroll expenditures, and generating earnings statements easy.
This template lets you organize payroll data in one place: keep track of wages, hours worked, and taxes withheld.
4. General Sales Budget Worksheet Template
Sales, they say, is the lifeblood of business. So, imagine a small business without a sales budget template. This template guides inventory purchasing decisions, and helps the sales team to optimize their sales strategies and sales planning. It features sections for revenue estimates, expenses breakdowns, and projections.
5. Cash flow statement template
A cash flow statement template is a tool that shows the cash moving in and out of a business. It is usually used alongside profit and loss statement templates and company balance sheets.
It features sections like operations cash flow, net profit, investing cash flow and financing costs.
Looking for an automated version? Check Rows cash flow template, integrated with your bank account
6. Hubspot marketing budget template
Small businesses need marketing to thrive and dominate market space. And they can't maximize the market’s potential without having a budget in place. This marketing template by HubSpot will help you track and manage monthly and quarterly marketing budgets, helping you keep focus on investing on what matters the most.
7. Event budget template
Want to run budgets for events? This general event budget template is a tool for a variety of events. It covers tracking of basic costs for small businesses looking to host bit-sized events. For this template, consider typical expenses like event production,promotion, equipment hire, guest invitation e.t.c
8. Startup business budget template
If you have a startup, you needed to guard your financial resources effectively. This ready made startup budget template helps you identify and define the amount of revenue tailored to meet business goals.
It features empty boxes for startups to fill budgeted and actual expenses and a monthly operating costs as revenue relation. You can add investor contributions, loans, and additional funding.
9. Expense tracking template
One of the key aspects of budget planning is expenses tracking. This template offers an organized overview for tracking business's expenses. It automatically calculate total expenses and a space for describing how each expenses incurred.
10. Project-specific budget template
A project specific budget template is a template that shows an overview of project tasks, and project costs.
It is used to plan and track all steps or tasks taken to achieve the success of a particular project.
This project budget template serves as a financial roadmap, helping ensure project success while maintaining fiscal responsibility.
Read more: 10 Best Free Financial Projection Templates for 2025
FAQs
How do I create a budget for my small business?
Creating a budget for your small business requires steps like:
Gather financial information
Estimate your revenue
List out fixed expenses
Calculate variable expenses
Create profit and cash flow
Get a budget template
What is the best format for a budget?
A spreadsheet budget format offers the most flexibility and comprehensive tracking. It typically includes columns for: budget category, projected amount, actual amount e.t.c In addition, it can be a monthly, quarterly or annual type of spreadsheet.
How do I create a simple budget template?
Choose your platform: Rows? Excel? Google sheets?
Create column headings
Add income tracking category
Add expense categories
Create tabs for monthly, yearly, or quarterly review
Then duplicate the template for use
Conclusion
The above listed templates are essential tools for small businesses looking to scale their business revenue. As you know, you can't measure what you don't track.
All monies that flow in and out must be accounted for as related to the budgeted timeframe.
To get started, start using Rows' simple budget template today.
