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A budget that is a single annual number cannot be managed. This planner splits it by month and by owner, and compares against actuals as they land, so an overrun is visible in month three rather than at year end.
The actual columns, with sample rows
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Category | Owner | Monthly plan | Actual | Variance | % used |
| 2 | Salaries | People | 184,000 | 186,400 | -2,400 | 101.3% |
| 3 | Cloud & tools | Engineering | 12,500 | 9,880 | +2,620 | 79.0% |
| 4 | Marketing | Growth | 22,000 | 28,140 | -6,140 | 127.9% |
| 5 | Office & travel | Ops | 7,400 | 5,020 | +2,380 | 67.8% |
Why each one is written the way it is
=[@[Monthly plan]]-[@Actual]
Variance signed so that positive is favourable on cost lines. Getting this direction consistent across the sheet is what makes the totals readable at a glance.
=IF([@[Monthly plan]]=0, "", [@Actual]/[@[Monthly plan]])
Percentage of budget consumed, blank for unbudgeted categories so they stand out rather than erroring.
=SUMIFS(Actuals[Amount],Actuals[Category],[@Category],Actuals[Month],"<="&CurrentMonth)
Year-to-date actuals pulled from the transactions sheet, so the budget is never retyped from the accounting export.
=[@[Annual plan]]-SUMIFS(Actuals[Amount],Actuals[Category],[@Category])
Remaining annual budget, which is the number an owner actually needs before approving a spend.
A worked example with real numbers
A 40-person company budgeted marketing annually and reviewed it at half year. Splitting the same annual figure across months and comparing monthly showed 128% consumption by March — an agency retainer had been booked quarterly in advance against a monthly plan. Reprofiling the plan rather than cutting the spend resolved it, but the useful part was seeing it in month three instead of month six.
Tab by tab
| Tab | Contents |
|---|---|
| Budget | Category, owner, monthly plan and annual total. |
| Actuals | Transaction-level import from the accounting system. |
| Variance | Plan versus actual by month and by owner. |
| Forecast | Full-year projection based on run rate to date. |
| README | How to map your chart of accounts onto the categories. |
What is included, and what to look at next
Specific to this workbook, not generic
Monthly, even if you only review quarterly. Monthly granularity lets you profile spend that is not even across the year — insurance, annual licences, seasonal marketing — and a quarterly view is a simple aggregation of it.
Give it a category rather than leaving it blank. An "Other" line that grows past a few percent is itself the finding: it means the category list no longer describes how you spend.
Yes. Export the transaction list and map account codes to categories once on the Actuals sheet; both exports have a stable enough structure for Power Query to handle repeat refreshes.
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