Business Expense Tracker

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Do you know how much your business is actually spending on a monthly basis?

It's surprisingly difficult to figure out. According to Teampay’s 2018 report on optimizing expense systems, companies often struggle with:

  • Your expenses live in different bank accounts, credit cards and payment solutions, so it's hard to get a solid understanding of them at a glance.
  • Accounting statements are hard to understand and they're not current. Processing and reconciling of company spend in a chaotic system creates additional manual work for lean finance teams.
  • Reconciliation and granular spending analysis is difficult to do with one card statement. Custom spreadsheets get messy and disorganized fast.

I've been there. What ends up happening is that you ballpark your expenses, and as a result, you end up perpetually underestimating your expenses. Every month, some expense will crop up and you'll end up with less profit than you hoped.

This Airtable base broke me out of my cycle and helped our marketing agency create an extremely profitable business through reliable expense tracking.

How to use this base

  1. Each month, you create a record for that month and tally up all of your expenses.
  2. There are two main types of expenses: 1) salaries and 2) itemized expenses. Salaries are tallied up and multiplied by 1.1 to get a rough calculation of the amount after payroll taxes (you could enter them precisely as well). For my business, itemized expenses come out of Bill.com and they're the bigger expenses, while smaller expenses are paid for by the credit card and they're not itemized. They go in as a total in the credit card spend column.
  3. Finally, we track how much we pay to our payment processor, Stripe, per transaction.
  4. All of this gets tallied up and goes into total expenses. If you have additional sources of expenses, like direct debit from your bank account, that you want to track, just add it as an additional column and include it in the sum for total expenses.
  5. Chart your expenses using Airtable blocks to monitor your expenses. You're looking for 1) how your expenses grow over time and 2) what segment of your expenses is growing. This will tell you where you can cut back on your expenses to make your budget work.

This base is a dead simple way to track your expenses that becomes quite powerful as you use it more and more. Tracking our business expenses with Airtable has transformed our business and I hope it can help yours too!

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Updated June 4, 2018 at 12:30 PM
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