Businesses of all sizes need a budget. Whether you’re just starting out, or you’ve been in business for years, you need to know how to create and use a business budget in just minutes. There are many resources out there on the subject, but this is our take on the best way to go about it. We’ll walk through what you need, where to find them, and how to put together your first budget.
This comprehensive guide will help you get started with budgeting and find the right tool for your business. It covers related topics such as Budget Software free, Best Small Business Budgeting Software, and Budgeting and Forecasting Software.
Business Budget Management Software
1. Cube
Our top pick for FP&A software is Cube, a strong and user-friendly FP&A application. Here is a brief description of Cube:
- The first spreadsheet-native FP&A software that helps finance plan for the unexpected and move the business forward.
- Eliminates manual work and provides the real-time insights finance needs to strategize with speed and agility.
- Pairs the flexibility and familiarity of your spreadsheets with the control and power of enterprise software.
- Implements quickly. Cube gets you up and running in days, not months, which means faster time to value at a lower cost.
- Connects with any source system, any browser, and any sheet in moments, so you don’t have to change how you work.
- Access to an award-winning customer team with deep FP&A experience.
2. Workday Adaptive Planning
Enterprise solutions for planning, modeling, budgeting, and forecasting for financial, labor, and sales needs are offered by Workday Adaptive Planning, formerly known as Adaptive Insights. Without the use of spreadsheets or outdated solutions, their technologies seek to foster collaboration across the organization.
For large businesses, Workday Adaptive Planning for Finance offers financial planning and analytics. They also add modeling, teamwork, analytics, management reporting, board reporting, scenario planning, and financial consolidation features to their FP&A system.
3. Anaplan
Complex scenario planning, intelligent forecasting, and quicker decision-making are all facilitated by Anaplan. Their corporate-wide solutions link strategy to results while also linking accountability to a single source of truth.
In order to integrate people, data, and plans across the organization and make the best decisions, Anaplan especially offers FP&A solutions. The solution consists of planning, budgeting, and forecasting, as well as specialist finance planning, operational planning, and planning for financial and operational planning, all of which promote better and quicker decision-making.
4. Planful
A cloud-based FP&A software platform from Planful delivers reporting, consolidation, and structured and dynamic planning. The Planful platform raises the financial dialogue and supports quicker, more certain, and more strategic decision-making.
Planful provides solutions for managing cash flow, employee reporting, financial reporting, annual operations planning, monthly close and consolidation, and multi-dimensional analysis for the finance industry. Early in 2020, the business changed its name from Host Analytics to better target mid-market clients.
5. Vena
Vena provides a comprehensive planning platform with ready-made solutions to automate time-consuming operations that connects people, processes, and systems. Financial planning and analysis, reporting, compliance reporting, and financial closing are examples of specific competencies. Vena provides FP&A software that is “pre-configured” for a prescriptive approach and can be altered to suit particular requirements.
6. Prophix
By automating routine processes, Prophix’s Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solution aims to increase profitability and reduce risk. With cloud or on-premise solution options, their technologies assist Finance in automatically budgeting, planning, consolidating, and reporting.
7. Jira
Jirav is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis tool that frees accounting and finance teams from the use of antiquated, error-prone spreadsheets for budgeting and forecasting. You can track, forecast, and share the data that matters most to your organization since it is totally configurable.
8. DataRails
Analytics is what DataRails does for the financial sector. Their financial analytics platform was created to give finance professionals the tools they need to easily gather, report, and analyze data. DataRails automates the data collection from each of your organizational systems and spreadsheets, resulting in the creation of a consolidated database of all your numbers without requiring you to alter the way you work.
9. Centage
With the help of Centage’s Planning Maestro, FP&A can make choices more swiftly and intelligently, respond to market changes rapidly, take prudent risks, and seize new possibilities. You may use the tool to create flexible, driver-based strategies, predict likely financial performance, monitor outcomes, and distribute vital information throughout the company.
10. OnPlan
With the help of the financial modeling software OnPlan, you can interact with your FP&A team to forecast, budget, and perform benchmarking with improved visibility and transparency. You provide OnPlan your current spreadsheet models, and they create a model just for you with useful dashboards, charts, graphs, and more.
What is Financial Forecasting?
Making financial projections in order to forecast and estimate your organization’s short- and long-term financial performance is known as financial forecasting. Organizations all across the world use forecasting as the cornerstone of finance and FP&A and as the basis for decision-making. FP&A often collaborates with the executive team and the rest of the company to acquire information, identify market trends and movements, and eventually produce predictions.
Forecasting in the past has frequently been based on past performance, present performance and trajectory, and projections of future market, competition, and internal performance, strategy, and execution. FP&A analyzes this data to forecast future cash flows, expenditures, revenues, profits, and other financial variables.
How are Financial Forecasts Used?
Forecasts are essential for internal financial modeling, financial planning, budgeting, hiring and personnel, capital expenditures, strategy development, and overall organizational execution.
The CEO, CFO, and other executives can decide to increase budgets in various areas of the company to take advantage of the predicted strong growth in earnings, for instance.
Business leaders might also prepare to depart or reduce investments in some markets or products if FP&A expects slow growth or contractions in certain areas.
The CEO and CFO also utilize financial forecasts externally to communicate with creditors and investors, create reports and projections, and determine broader financial criteria like company valuation, objectives, bonuses, and more.
Best Small Business Budgeting Software
Xero
Best for small business
Xero is a popular small business online accounting solution because of how simple it is to use. Tools for financial reporting provide immediate, current reporting with direct links to all original transactions. You can also view cash flow in real-time, wherever you are, with online accounting.
At its core, Xero is a robust yet user-friendly accounting program created from the ground up. It is all you need to run your small business because it is written in straightforward language for users who are not familiar with accounting jargon.
Scoro
Scoro combines budgeting features with other tools to manage your entire company in one system. You can also manage expenses and resources, use a financial dashboard, and manage project budgets.
Top features:
- Budget planning and forecasting
- Financial reports and analysis
- Unlimited project budgets
- Financial KPI dashboard
- Invoicing and professional services automation
- Automated revenue stream from invoices
What’s special about this tool: Scoro combines the tools for budgeting, CRM, and project management so that you can manage your entire business in one solution and access all the financial data in one place.
Pricing: From $26 user/month, 14-days free trial.
Quickbooks
With over 4.3 customers worldwide, Quickbooks is one of the most trusted business financial toolkit available online.
The tools available on Quickbooks let you:
- Track income & expenses
- Maximize tax deductions
- Invoice & accept payments
- Run reports
- Send estimates
- Track sales & sales tax
- Manage bills
- Work together with your team
- Clock employee time and billable hours
- Track Inventory
- Create and manage budgets
- Pay employees with free direct deposit
You can try Quickbooks free for 30 days and then choose the plan which fits to your needs better.
Freeagent
The accounting program Freeagent was created with the needs of freelancers and small enterprises in mind. You may manage all of your invoices, expenses, projects, and taxes with the online accounting software.
The straightforward pricing of this software makes it stand out from similar products.
Freshbooks
97% of clients, according to the business, suggest Freshbooks.
The software has an intuitive user interface, the capacity to automate invoicing, the management of projects and payments, and the tracking of time. You can manage your business from anywhere with Freshbooks’ availability on the Android and iOS platforms.
The three different plans for this accounting software start at $15. By registering for the website’s free trial, you can try any of them.
Bill.com
You can automate every financial transaction using Bill.com. It allows you to automate the way you pay bills, send invoices, and receive payments and is made to integrate with Quickbooks, Xero, and many other accounting programs (up to 3x faster).
7. Jira
Jirav is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis tool that frees accounting and finance teams from the use of antiquated, error-prone spreadsheets for budgeting and forecasting. You can track, forecast, and share the data that matters most to your organization since it is totally configurable.#
Vena
Vena provides a comprehensive planning platform with ready-made solutions to automate time-consuming operations that connects people, processes, and systems. Financial planning and analysis, reporting, compliance reporting, and financial closing are examples of specific competencies. Vena provides FP&A software that is “pre-configured” for a prescriptive approach and can be altered to suit particular requirements.
Budgyt
Best for cloud
A budgeting and forecasting tool for any company, Budgyt is simple to use and intuitive. With this cloud-based solution, creating budgets is quicker, more precise, and more dependable thanks to an intuitive budgeting tool that takes the place of cumbersome spreadsheets. Clients in any industry with several stores, units, or divisions can use this service. Individual budgets are rolled up by Budgyt, which also produces reports and analyses. Additionally, Budgyt imports and exports data from the general ledger accounting software you now use.
Enterprise, mid-market, and small firms in the for-profit and non-profit sectors all favor this approach. If you are a for-profit organization or a non-profit, there are different price options.
Budgeting and Forecasting Software
Workday Adaptive Planning
best overall
A corporate performance management (CPM) product called Workday Adaptive Planning has forecasting and budgeting functions. Businesses in all market segments—Enterprise, mid-market, and small—love the Workday Business Planning Cloud.
Forecasting models supported by Workday include::
- Budgeting expenses
- Forecasting revenue
- Workforce planning
- Capital Planning
- SaaS account modeling
- Sales planning
- Academic calendar modeling
Those who are closest to the business can plan thanks to the purpose-built solutions provided by Workday software for finance. the whole collection of cloud-based software products supported by a strong in-memory technological platform that enables large-scale built-in analytics and functional and corporate-wide business planning.
Xero
Best for small business
Xero is a popular small business online accounting solution because of how simple it is to use. Tools for financial reporting provide immediate, current reporting with direct links to all original transactions. You can also view cash flow in real-time, wherever you are, with online accounting.
At its core, Xero is a robust yet user-friendly accounting program created from the ground up. It is all you need to run your small business because it is written in straightforward language for users who are not familiar with accounting jargon.
Budget Maestro
Best for mid-market
For mid-market and even enterprise-level businesses wishing to handle budgeting and forecasting with reliability, Budget Maestro is the perfect answer. For the purpose of creating more accurate budgets and financial predictions, the program automates many of the labor-intensive and error-prone activities involved with using spreadsheets.
Budget Budget accuracy is continuously maintained by Maestro’s built-in financial intelligence and business rules, which are based on your assumptions and processes. Working with a centralized database eliminates the possibility of human error leading to data disparities. Additionally, any adjustments to estimates or hypotheses are immediately updated, ensuring that you are constantly working with the same version of the truth.
Prophix
Best free to start
A free trial of PROPHIX’s budgeting and forecasting software is available, and it contains a central database, periodic forecasts (monthly, mid-year, multi-year), and other forecasting requirements that are all easily accessible. For proper analysis and management, this software provides income statements, balance sheets, cash flow, and other company-specific budgeting requirements to your desktop.
PROPHIX provides several options to increase forecasting precision. With PROPHIX’s versatile modeling capabilities, it is able to undertake what-if analyses, inter-period forecasts, actual to forecasts/budget comparisons, rolling forecast development, and forecasting based on numerous key performance metrics.
Budgyt
Best for cloud
A budgeting and forecasting tool for any company, Budgyt is simple to use and intuitive. With this cloud-based solution, creating budgets is quicker, more precise, and more dependable thanks to an intuitive budgeting tool that takes the place of cumbersome spreadsheets. Clients in any industry with several stores, units, or divisions can use this service. Individual budgets are rolled up by Budgyt, which also produces reports and analyses. Additionally, Budgyt imports and exports data from the general ledger accounting software you now use.
Enterprise, mid-market, and small firms in the for-profit and non-profit sectors all favor this approach. If you are a for-profit organization or a non-profit, there are different price options.
Limelight
The financial planning and reporting software platform Limelight is simple to use and quick to set up. The web-based Limelight software enables collaboration, data integration, real-time planning, and reporting from any device.
Dynac CPM
Imagine if your income statement and balance sheet are integrated, producing current cash flow statements whenever you require them. Add to that dynamic rolling predictions with “What if” scenarios so you can see the results of company choices.
Vivid Reports
is made to be an add-in for Microsoft Excel that is completely integrated with the general ledger accounts, balances, and transactions in your ERP. You can utilize all of Excel’s features, and it is quite simple to learn and use.
CALUMO
For accountants, CALUMO is a reporting, budgeting, and forecasting tool. Organizations can easily and rapidly report on, budget for, forecast, and plan their financial, sales, operational, manufacturing, and other initiatives with CALUMO.
Solver
The main factor influencing the expansion and profitability of your firm is quicker and better decision-making. Managers may readily get the data they need to examine business operations and financial data because it is all conveniently available in one package.
Pricing: N/A
Budget Software Free
Managing your money successfully includes keeping a close eye on your expenses. One way to do that is to take advantage of free software and services. Free personal finance software can be surprisingly robust, helping you track spending, create and manage budgets, and run reports.
Mint
The creators of Quickbooks and TurboTax, Intuit, offer a free online budgeting tool called Mint. This software gathers all of your financial information and provides you with a summary of your spending, bills, budget, and credit score. You may set objectives and reminders, make your own budget, and sync your data between the web and apps. Encryption and multi-factor authentication improve security. To keep track of your money and portfolio, utilize Mint.
Access Mint via the web or phone apps for iOS and Android.
GnuCash
GnuCash is desktop software; its features include tracking bank accounts, stocks, income, and expenses. GnuCash is based on double-entry accounting for balanced books and you can run a number of reports to see your financial data. GnuCash also offers small-business accounting tools that let you manage customers and vendors, handle invoicing and bill payment, and even payroll.
GnuCash is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, BSD, and Solaris. There is a companion app for Android that will let you track expenses on the go and later import them into the desktop software.
AceMoney Lite
AceMoney Lite bills itself as the best Quicken alternative. You can manage your budgets, track your finances in multiple currencies, keep an eye on your investments and analyze your spending habits. You can also do online banking. As this is the lite version, you’re limited to two accounts; the full version supports unlimited accounts.
AceMoney Lite is compatible with Windows and Mac OS X.
Personal Capital
Personal Capital offers free financial software for tracking investments and planning for retirement, in addition to its tools for cash flow, spending, budgeting and net worth. Personal Capital’s focus is on investments, showing you the performance of your portfolio over time and helping you make decisions for the future, so its budgeting components aren’t as robust as other software.
If you’re not an investor or prefer fine-tuning your budget to getting the broad view, Personal Capital may not be the best fit. However, if you want to save for college or retirement, its free tools will show you whether you’re on track.
Personal Capital can be accessed via the web or apps for Android and iOS.
Buddi
Buddi is an open-source budget software that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems and has been translated into multiple languages. Buddi can encrypt financial data with a password, and it’s designed to be easy to use even if you have no financial background.
Features include budgeting, tracking accounts, and personal finance reports, but you will have to enter transactions manually. Free plugins add more features, and the online user manual is easy to read and use.
Buddi is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Free Budget Spreadsheets
If you don’t need fully featured personal financial software and you’re just concerned about keeping a budget, there are some great free budget spreadsheet templates you can use with Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice Calc or Google Sheets. Just download and open them in your spreadsheet software to get a handle on your cash flow.
Conclusion
Businesses have a lot of expenses that can be hard to budget for. However, using a business budget can help you make the most out of your money while still ensuring that your business is profitable. By creating a statement of purpose and finding the money to start your business, you can improve your overall level of profitability while also making use of your budget to improve your business. Overall, spending your business budget wisely will help you reach financial stability and grow your business.