Budgeting and Forecasting for Beginners

By James McLellan

Introduction

Budgeting and forecasting are, for me, extremely difficult subjects to establish a grasp on.

Most people I’m familiar with either use QuickBooks (or some other tool); and if that tool isn’t sufficient to meet their needs they do forecasting and tracking by hand.

What I have attached is a pretty simple spreadsheet. It’s based off some of the publicly available calendar applications and hopefully makes forecasting and tracking a bit easier if you are (like me) a middle-of-the-road financial software user with a need.

Using a Spreadsheet for Projections

You can download the spreadsheet here,

or here – http://www.mclellansys.com/articles/article006/budget-spreadsheet.xls

The budget part should look familiar – it is composed of entries just like you would probably make on a pen & paper budget.

• Description – what the item is
• Credit Amount – if this adds to your cash account
  
• Debit Amount – if this item subtracts from your cash account
  
• Starts On – date the transaction occurs
  
• Repeats – for repeating events, how many days before the transaction occurs again
  
• # Repeats – the limit for repeating events that only repeat a limited number of times
  

Up at the top, you see a few more items:

• Forecast Starting Date – date the forecast would begin
• Forecast out – how many days to project out using your budget below
• Number of budget rows – how many rows below
  
  
  

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