Mark Budget Proposal Template Made Easy

Signature budget proposal template

so let me walk you through the project budgeting template and this is how what you see when you open it and there are different tabs at the bottom let's have a look at each of those one by one the first tab how to use this template well here I'm giving a few hints on how to properly use the excel file then the next one reporting this is where the excel file automatically summarizes the values which you have entered in the other tabs and it also generates a chart rest you can't see anything right now here because all the costs are at 0 so nothing to see here you can change this later on you can just make copies or make it more detailed or change to year that's up to you now the first real and important tab is the labor effort tab so in this tab you enter the names of your team members external internal doesn't matter and the estimated effort in days so it's also written here at the top labor effort in days and the timeline you can see here at the top currently I mean I've included here two years 2018 and 2019 with the months and for each month you see a different column for plan and actual so when you're starting a project you obviously have to fill the plan column and as you move along you track the actual effort of your team and you enter the values here in days now to make the template easy to use and to help you you know make sure you don't change anything but you shouldn't change I have used some color coding so in general whenever you see a green line here at the top it means that you your you should edit and you are allowed to edit the cells in the bottom which come below so what's what else can you see here we have a totals column where it adds up the days as you stand as you scroll to the right you see here's another two columns where the file adds up the plan and actual values for each year so 2018 and there's another one as you scroll further to the right for 2019 but you can just change the year to whatever you're currently is so that's where you start enter the labor effort in days now the next step is the labor cost tab and this is purely a calculation sheet you should not change anything in here particularly don't change the formulae which are shown here at the top if you if you make a mistake here and if you delete something for example the whole file won't work so the numbers will not be correct so don't change anything and to make sure you don't take make a mistake you see here there's a I use the red line color coding at the top so red means don't edit the cells which come below of course you can copy like extend the file to add more rows if you have a bigger team this is possible but always copy and these these two tabs so the labor effort and the labor cost sheet they are basically one one on one copy they are identical except for the formulae so the same name same number of rows same column structure it may sound difficult or complicated for now but I will show you an example later on and you'll see it's very easy next step is the travel cost well here you enter the travel cost so accommodation hotel fees travel train ticket airplane ticket whatever you have and here it's entered in dollar basis to always make sure that you're using the right unit of measure here and the time line is also identical as you've seen in the other sheets there's a column with a red top bar it's the rate so a benefit of this template which I'm using also in my project it's that you can make very easily calculations using predefined rates so let's say you have a flight from Chicago to New York and it's always let's say $250 you can predefine this rate and the file will automatically calculate a total travel cost for for your entire team then we have another tab investments here is very enter depreciation amounts so when when you're part of your project you're buying assets like expensive machinery for example or hardware software whatever it's usually depreciated over certain times been like for years instead of being booked in the accounts at the time of purchase so if this is not relevant for you if your project is not concerned with any expensive investment goods then you can just leave you can just ignore this tab then we have another tab called our cost so anything else which doesn't fit the other labels like labor or travel or investment you can enter here so especially these smaller cost items like I don't know some so fees for insurance or things like that you can include here printing fees don't know the last tab is the rates tab so here you can define or you must define the rate for the labor so if you have someone from accounting what's the cost per day and these values you should get from either your internal accounting department or from HR but this is for internal this is like a fictitious rate for external you have you get a quote from a service provider how much he charges per day and you define this value in the in the rates tab same for the travel travel cost columns here so you can define standard rates for a flight ticket for the night in a hotel and so on and you can add more cost types here so this is really flexible now let's use the project budgeting template with a real example and we have a project here it's called the happy customer IT project and this is our team we have four people for our internal Amy Fisher from accounting John Smith from sales and Rebecca Clark from software development in addition we have one guy Tom Henderson who works for a company called super soft and we've marked him here as external so we are again in our project budgeting template and let's start by entering the effort for our team members so you go to the tab labor and we start by entering the names so we have first Amy Fisher she's from accounting John Smith from sales and Rebecca Clark from software development let's make this a little bit bigger that you can see what I'm doing here and then we have a another guy external guy he's Tom Henderson and I'm using here for the department I'm writing here external slash super super soft I want to know is it easily that is it is an external team member so this way I'm adding here this prefix and you have to be careful with the how you write the department names and I'll show you why so but first let's enter here the effort so we have to enter days here not hours or dollars but only days so let's say Amy is working in January for three days let's add some sample values it doesn't matter here really what we use now Rebecca and let's say Tom is a bit busier here in March so he has to work for ten days that's what we are planning let's not go any further let's keep it simple now if you look at the reporting sheet you see there's still no cost shown here and the reason why is because so far we have only added the effort but we have not maintained the other sheets or the other tabs which are important here labor costs you see this is also still zero no cost here and what you have to do next is you have to maintain the rates for the cost for the people who are in your team so we have first Amy Fisher she's from accounting so all I have to do here is enter accounting here and let's say the rate is $900 then we have John Smith he's from sales so sales they are not as expensive let's say here 700 and then we have Rebecca Clark from software development so I have to use here the exact department code that I've used also in the labor effort sheet which is software development so no I'm not using any blanks in between or anything else it must be exactly the same otherwise the excel won't be able to link both values and automatically calculate the cost this may also make this a bit bigger for you software developers are usually quite expensive so let's say the daily rate is like $1,100 now let's also assume that we have to do a little bit of travel in the project so Rebecca our software development developer she's going to a training so it's a flight she is gonna take to fly the plane from Chicago to Seattle so we you we try to come up with a nice short code here let's say fly it Chicago Seattle it doesn't really matter whether you use large caps or small caps this is really just a code for making the calculation work so the flight Chicago Seattle I mean this is a return flight so let's say it's 300 bucks then we have Rebecca has to stay in a hotel and the hotel in Seattle is 150 dollars per night this is how it works yeah we'll keep it simple for now so now we have to check if the calculation has already worked now for the labor so let's go to labor cost ah you see I can see here actual dollar amounts so Amy Fisher she's working in in January for three days and her daily rate is nine hundred dollars 900 times three is $2,700 so that's why this number is correct and the APIs are also calculated in the same way by the way I absolutely recommend you to check these values at the end once you have entered all the cost items in the budgeting template they might there may be a mistake or maybe you have done a type or whatever you have to check if the numbers actually add up in in every tab where they are included so this is really nice because now I can see here the the cost per month total cost per month I can scroll further to the right to see the the totals for the year so in total we have labor cost of twenty nine thousand four hundred bucks in this in this tab the labor cost you you must not change anything so this is using it is using formulae to do all the calculation that's why I have also this red line again indicator here to know to make sure you know this is not something where you edit what you can do is of course if you need more more rows here so this is like limited to I don't know 15 15 rows so if you have more than 15 team members you have to add more rows and the best way I mean how you should do this it's not just insert a row but really to copy one of the existing ones so that all the formulae are also copied to the new rows this is very important so we didn't we forgot Thomas Tom so far so his whoops his Department shortcode is this one external super soft so I'm going back to the rates tab I am paste here the shortcode so tom is really expensive he's an external resource so let's say it's 1800 per day and now if you go back to the labor cost tab you should see here is one day is already included here and in mark she's working for ten days so we have 1800 which is the daily rate plot times 10 days is $18,000 very easy you see so now we make sure we save travel cost let's have a look at travel cost so here we haven't included anything and you see the the top bar is green so that means you have to maintain it actually so what we write here we as I said we want to send our team member Rebecca to a software development training in Seattle so you just enter it free text here software development and training whoops sorry for Rebecca and brackets Seattle so that we know later on what it's about the type the column B this we take here from the rates tab so it must be identical so we use here the flight Chicago Seattle oops no I won't put it in here sorry I was in the wrong column make sure you always in the right column so now you see I entered here this short code and it immediately put throughout the rate for the flight from the rates tab so so and this is now now here for the next columns you have to actually use you have to manually enter the formula so let's say the training for Rebecca is in January so she has and she's going there once so it's really just you can write one time the 300 here so if you were if we had like three trips to Seattle you would enter here three times c5 and it would give you the total flight cost so for now it's really just the flight cost I should be more specific flight Seattle then we have accomodate at a hotel in Seattle so what did we use here as a abbreviation Hotel Seattle um you see the hotel rate daily rate is immediately coming up now let's assume Rebecca stays in Seattle for five nights so what you would enter here is a formula equals sign to show Excel that you will want to enter a formula then the rate per night and the number of nights Rebekah supposed to stay so times five she's linked for five nights so this is the the travel cost this is how you enter on the travel cost and you see again exhale summarizes or template summarizes the cost neatly so you can just see the total at the bottom and in the same way if you scroll further to the right you see that we have planned a total cost of 1050 and the year of 2018 now maybe you have some additional cost items let's say you have have to consult an attorney for some matter as part of your project this wouldn't fit anywhere in the labor category because it's I don't know paid as a flat fee whatever I just want to separate it separate it from the other cost categories so I'm going here the to the other cost tab let's make this bigger and again here is the green bar at the top which means you are you must enter value here values here so I just write in free text [Music] attorney consultation on I don't know invoice form whatever just something that you know what it's about and here you enter the dollar amounts so let's say this is in March you're going to see the attorney and then it takes a while until you get the invoice so this will be only in April when the attorney fees are being built and let's say this is six thousand bucks again it's summarized here if you had any other add items exclude sum up the values here and also in the total section on the right side you see the total yearly other cost so now if we go to the reporting sheet we see things have changed the actual cost are still zero because we haven't we are just starting out we have not generated any cost but our plan costs are now shown so the labor cost we have 51,000 we have travel cost of around one thousand dollars we have so far not included any any depreciation amounts no investment cost and we have the attorney fee which is which amounts to six thousand which is included here under our costs so in total fifty eight thousand fifty dollars now again please make sure that once you have entered all the efforts and all the cost items make sure that you add and check the values whether the whether the total here is really the sum of the labor cost plus travel cost plus investment cost plus our cost take a sheet take a calculator and double check these values because what you don't want to have is to take this value and go into your project with this amount and then as you move on you recognize that you've actually made some actual mistake and there are ten thousand dollars missing so your project is actually costing more than what you showed at the beginning so this is not something you want now let's say we are two months into the project and we have already incurred the actual cost so hey I do in my projects I track the cost on a monthly basis so every at the end of every month I would sit down and see what was the actual labor cost the actual travel cost etc and then I enter the values here so what I would do at the end of January I would go to a me to John to Rebecca and to Tom and I would ask them yeah how much how many hours did you work for this on this project and I would get their numbers and I would enter it here in the actuals column very simple so let's say a me here we were quite on the spot so it's all also three days as we estimated for John he had to do some more work so more than expected so like three days Rebecca for her we also were slightly above let's say we are three point five days I'm sorry just a run for Matt and for Tom we are on the spot one day as planned so now you can scroll down and you see where we were a bit over budget for this month of January which is not a problem if you know some in some months you are above budget in some months you are below budget so it should even out ideally February there we are really more or less on the spot except for Tom heading to work a bit more and for March we were below below our plan so amy was only working for four days John works for three days and Rebecca for five days and Tom could finish his work also in less than ten days so this is how you track the actual cost and you can see the numbers now first of all at the at the button so if you're doing a month-by-month comparison you could pull out the numbers here you can compare plan an actual very easily and also if you scroll to the right if you are interested in in the yearly totals let's say you're at the end of the year so you could compare here your plan and actuals for the year 2018 in this case so we are below budget pie by two days how does this look in costs well we can have either a look in the labor cost sheet or in the reporting tab so now you see that they're their actual values included here and these are pulled automatically by by the template so these are not not entered manually that's why this red line again don't enter anything here in the in the columns with a red line on top so again I could see here the cost in dollar amounts now you can also see the cost here in the reporting tab so for labor we are we are under budget which is also which is good always what we want and you see this also depicted in this graph with the orange bar being the extra cost and the blue one being the planned cost now we haven't entered and the actuals for travel so let's let's do this and also for the attorney fee travel cost so as we are planning estimating these fees there's usually always a variation unless you buy the tickets right at the start of your project so let's say that the flight was more expensive because we booked late so here you have to manually again enter the the values so for the for the hotel fees we the raid was the same let's just assume that so it was 150 times five is $750 for five nights in Seattle nice city now the attorney fee which it was was really the same maybe some some extra charges for additional copies or whatever but in total it was not not a surprise and now go back to the reporting sheet and you have now your complete plan and actuals side-by-side very easy as you can see