Operating Expense Planning

What's Inside

An operating budget template helps you create a budget that you can use to compare expenditures (like COGS, or cost of goods sold) with revenue or other income sources in order to determine an operation's viability.

An operating budget estimates every line item on an income statement. Sales, materials, labor, overhead (COGS), and SG&A  (selling, general, and administrative) costs. The end result is a pro forma (expected) income statement.

This template includes different methodologies to plan your data. When planning future resource needs, it’s important to think about how costs move with revenues, and what costs are relatively fixed (rent, utilities) and which ones are more variable (personnel-related, which grow with headcount).

Variable costs include, among other things:

• Cost of goods sold,
• Direct selling costs,
• Sales commissions,
• Payment processing fees,
• Freight,
• Certain aspects of marketing,
• Direct labor

Fixed costs typically don't vary with changes in revenue and are mostly constant, at least within the time frame of the operating budget.

Examples of fixed costs include:

• Rent,
• Head office,
• Insurance,
• Telecommunication,
• Management salaries & benefits,
• Utilities

You will want to consider all variable and fixed costs by department for each period. Using previous year trends and future revenue projects will help determine expected costs.

The result of collecting this information from your department leads is an accurate, timely view of what resources you need to achieve your goals and how much they will cost.

Use with Cube

This is an Excel template. You don't need to be a Cube customer to use it!

But if you are a Cube user, you can start using this template in under two minutes. Here's how.

Step 1: Open the template in Excel or Sheets.

Step 2: Customize the row and column headers to match your Cube's dimensions and filters.

Step 3: Select the range where you want to fetch your data. 

Step 4: Fetch your data.