Download zero based budgeting excel template for businesses and professionals. With this template, you can plan your budget for financial year and calendar year. This is a easy to download and free excel template for budgeting. Businesses require budgeting activities to be done prior to start of the financial or calendar year. Hence, this template can be useful if you are adopting zero based budgeting approach.
What is Zero based budgeting ?
Zero Based Budgeting is a saving and expenditure plan where you allocate every dollar/ currency of your income to some specific purpose or expenditure area.
At the end of the worksheet, if your budget is fully balanced, you should have ZERO budget left over. Some of your income will be going into savings, some will be going towards expenses, some might even be invested. The point is to plan what you want to do with it.
Note : You can use ANY budget spreadsheet or excel template to apply the zero-based budgeting principles, but this template is useful on a very deliberate set of saving and expense categories.
Steps to use this Zero Based Budgeting Excel Template :
- Enter your income : If you are creating a monthly budget, list all sources of income for the month. If you actually get paid biweekly, you may want to base your budget on just two weeks of pay, then use your extra paycheck twice per year to do something special. If you get paid weekly, you can base your budget on 4 weeks. If your income varies a lot, you can base your budget on what you expect the minimum for the month will be.
- Enter your budget (savings and expenditure) : The categories in this worksheet have a very purposeful structure. They are designed to help you apply the ‘Pay God First’ principle, the ‘Pay Yourself First’ principal, the ‘Debt Snowball’ and ‘Savings Snowball’ techniques, the ‘Sinking Funds’ idea, and the ‘Envelope Budget’ system.
- Consider the adjustments : The categories in this worksheet have a very purposeful structure. They are designed to help you apply the ‘Pay God First’ principle, the ‘Pay Yourself First’ principal, the ‘Debt Snowball’ and ‘Savings Snowball’ techniques, the ‘Sinking Funds’ idea, and the ‘Envelope Budget’ system.
- Make Changes till the budget becomes Zero : If the final budget is negative, you can either try to increase your income, or cut back in one or more of your savings and expense categories. This is why using a spreadsheet is useful. You can easily change values in any part of the worksheet to try to get the “Budget Remaining” at the bottom of the Savings category to equal ZERO. The key principle to balancing your budget is to PRIORITIZE! Maybe you don’t need that magazine subscription, or that extra video streaming service. Maybe it’s time to see if your car insurance bill could be reduced. You may love your home, but maybe it’s time to downsize.
- Enter the Actual figures : If you don’t already have some other system for analyzing your spending, then at the end of the month, enter your actual income and spending in the right-hand columns of the worksheet. This spreadsheet doesn’t track the balances in your savings, envelopes, or checking accounts. But, to make a new budget for the following month, you should be tracking those account balances so that you can know what adjustments you can make in your plan for next month. Duplicate (copy) the Budget worksheet by holding down the Ctrl key as you click and drag the Budget worksheet tab. Then you can rename the tabs (like Jan, Feb, etc.) by right-clicking on the tab.
Download and use zero based budgeting excel format
To use this free zero based budgeting excel template, you should have Microsoft Office/ Microsoft Excel installed in your system.
After installing Excel or Spreadsheet, download the zip file of this template, extract the template using WinRAR or 7Zip decompressing software. Once extracted, you can open the file using Excel and start entering data or customizing the template.
