Tools
Small business budget worksheet
A simple monthly budget worksheet for your business.
Enter your monthly revenue and three expense lines — cost of goods, fixed costs, and everything else — and see your total expenses, monthly surplus or deficit, and net margin. It’s plain arithmetic on your own figures, not advice: nothing is sent anywhere, and a QuickBooks® ProAdvisor can build a full budget with you.
§ TL;DR
This is a working budget worksheet, not a download. Enter your monthly numbers and it shows total expenses, surplus or deficit, and net margin live. It’s a model of your own inputs — plain math, run entirely in your browser, nothing stored or sent.
It’s a starting structure, not financial advice; a QuickBooks ProAdvisor can turn it into a real budget and forecast on your actual books.
§ 01 · The worksheet
Work out your monthly budget.
Enter your figures; the result updates as you type. Your figures are worked out in your browser and are never sent to us. Our analytics records that the tool was used and which field you changed, never what you typed. Nothing else is sent until you decide to book a call.
Monthly surplus / deficit
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Enter your monthly revenue and the three expense lines above.
§ 02 · No black box
How the worksheet works.
The arithmetic is deliberately simple so you can trust it. Total expenses = cost of goods + fixed operating costs + other/variable costs. Surplus or deficit = revenue − total expenses. Net margin = surplus ÷ revenue, shown as a percentage. Splitting costs into those three buckets is enough to see whether the month works and where the weight sits.
Cost of goods (or cost of services) is what it directly costs to deliver what you sell. Fixed operating costs stay roughly level month to month — rent, salaries, software, insurance. Other/variable costs are everything that moves with activity — marketing, travel, supplies. Getting transactions into the right bucket is exactly the discipline good bookkeeping provides, which is why a budget is only as accurate as the books under it.
This worksheet is a single-month snapshot. A real budget is built once, then tracked against actuals every month and rolled forward as a forecast — that’s a budgeting-and-forecasting engagement, not a one-page tool. Use this to frame the conversation, not to replace it. It’s a model of your inputs, not advice.
STEP 1
Your own numbers
in your browser
STEP 2
Surplus & margin
instant, open math
STEP 3
Free discovery call
30 min · no obligation
STEP 4
A tracked budget
on your real books
§ 03 · Related
Where to go next.
§ 04 · Questions
Questions about budgeting.
Is this a downloadable template?
No — and we’d rather be straight about that than offer a file we don’t maintain. It’s a live worksheet: you enter your numbers and it calculates total expenses, surplus or deficit, and net margin instantly in your browser. If you want a full budget you can keep and track, a QuickBooks ProAdvisor builds that with you on your actual books.
Does this store or send my numbers?
No. The calculation runs in your browser, using only the figures you type, and those figures are never sent to us. Like the rest of the site, the page reports to our analytics that the tool was used and which field you changed, never what you typed. Nothing is stored on our side unless you choose to book a call and tell us yourself. You do not have to give us your name or email to use it.
How detailed should my expense buckets be?
For a quick monthly check, three buckets — cost of goods, fixed, and other/variable — are enough to see whether the month works. A working budget breaks those into real categories that match your chart of accounts, so you can track each line against actuals. That fuller structure is part of a budgeting engagement.
How is this different from a forecast?
A budget is your plan for a period; a forecast is your best current estimate of how the period will actually turn out, updated as real numbers come in. This worksheet is a single-month budget snapshot. Rolling it forward and tracking against actuals is forecasting — which a fractional CFO or advisory engagement provides.
How can TechBrot help beyond the worksheet?
We keep your books accurate so your budget buckets are real, and our budgeting-and-forecasting and fractional CFO engagements build full, tracked budgets and forward forecasts. Start with a free discovery call to talk it through.
From worksheet to working budget