How To Make A Budget Chart in Excel

How To Make A Budget Chart to Track Budget Costs with Excel

Creating a budget chart is pretty necessary when you want to communicate your budget information across different teams and your managers in your organization. Sometimes it’s not enough to just insert your budget information in a spreadsheet and just pass it around.

There are always going to be someone who probably doesn’t understand your information clearly. So putting it into a visual format might help to lighten things up a bit. It also helps to cut time, reading through rows of information can be a bit time consuming.

Using for example a pie chart to visualize your data will make it easier especially for executives who don’t have enough time on their hands daily.

To create a budget you can use a simple tool like Excel. All you got to do is organize your information properly, insert them into Excel and format them into a chart. You have other tools you can use online to create your budget chart. That will probably cost you a bit of cash.

That’s the reason why using Excel which is necessary.  It’s a low cost method that you can use to create it and it can be a better option. You can see in more detail on how to create a budget chart in Excel below.

How To Make A Budget Chart in Excel step by step tips:

Step 1

This is going to be a monthly budget which will then be turned into a chart. You are going to first create 4 main columns. These are going to named items, budget amount, actual amount and difference.

Step 2

Under the items column you are going to then have 2 sub-columns. These are going to be Income, expenses and total.  Under the income column you are going to have royalties, dividends and interests.  Under expenses put advertising cost, sales material costs, rent of production equipment, direct labor and property taxes.

Step 3

In the difference column you are going to minus your actual amount from your budget amount. This will help you to see if your expenses were out of shape for the month. For example it would look something like this in the difference column (Budget amount- actual amount). After you have inserted the different values and do the operation in the column. You are going to press enter then you will see the difference.

Step 4

Now let’s get to the main part which is the chart.  To create a chart you got to firstly select all the data you want to use in your chart. Click on the insert tab and go on recommended charts. When you’re on the recommended charts you can choose a chart of your preferences.

To customize your chart you can click on the upper right corner of your chart. This will allow you to customize the look of it, the titles on the different axes and even change up of the data being shown.

If you don’t see the tabs which can be quite normal, you can add the chart tools option on the Excel ribbon by clicking anywhere on the chart.

In summary this is a simple step by step guide you can follow to create a budget chart in Excel. If you follow the steps above you will quickly create a budget chart for your organization.