REPORT ON PROGRESS
Budgeting
Creating your first business budget doesn’t need to be complicated. Here’s a practical step-by-step process using Xero that takes about an hour.
How to Build a Business Budget — A Step-by-Step Guide for NZ Business Owners
If you don’t have a budget, you’re reporting against nothing. That makes it very hard to know whether you’re on track or not.
Creating your first budget doesn’t need to be a big project. Here’s a practical starting point using Xero:
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Run a Profit & Loss for the last month of the previous financial year (most likely 1–31 March).
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Use the Compare Periods function to include the previous 11 months alongside it.
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Export to Excel.
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Rearrange the columns from oldest to newest.
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Review each line and adjust up or down based on what you expect next year.
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Save the file and upload it to Xero through the Budget Manager function.
This gives you a working budget in about an hour. It won’t be perfect, but it’s a starting point — and a rough budget is far more useful than no budget.
Once it’s in Xero, use the Budget Variance report to track how you’re performing against it each month. Set aside time in your calendar to review this regularly and adjust your resources accordingly.
If you want something more detailed and reliable, we can prepare a budget with you. There are different levels to this depending on what you need.