Startup Budget Template: Free 12-Month Excel Budget (2026)

You've closed a round, or you're about to. The money looks like a lot. Then the first hires start, tool bills creep up and a legal invoice lands. A startup budget turns that money into a month-by-month plan. It shows when the cash runs short, long before it does. Below we explain what goes in one and the costs founders forget. Then we show how to check it against your real numbers, and how it sets your next raise. You also get a free startup budget template in Excel, where every output is a formula.

A startup budget is your plan for what the company will earn and spend each month, usually for the next 12 months. Say you have $300,000 in the bank. You spend $32,700 a month more than you earn. That's your net burn, and it means the cash lasts about nine months. A budget shows you this before it happens.

What should a startup budget include?

A startup budget has three parts. Money in: revenue and any funding. Money out: payroll, tools and software, marketing, rent and overheads, and one-off costs. And the result: net burn, cash at the end of each month and months of runway. Build it month by month for at least the next 12 months.

Here's each line, with month 1 of our template as the example.

Put each cost in the month the money leaves the bank, not spread evenly over the year. That goes for one-off startup expenses as much as monthly bills. A yearly software plan paid upfront hits one month. So does an annual tax bill. That's what makes the cash line honest.

Two lines usually drive the rest: the team and marketing. Our guides to the hiring plan and the sales and marketing budget show how to build each one. For what counts as an operating expense, and what doesn't, see startup operating expenses.

Startup budget template: a free 12-month Excel example

Our free startup budget template is a 12-month Excel workbook for a fictional SaaS startup. You fill in one Inputs sheet: cash, funding, price, hires, tools, marketing, rent and one-off costs. The Monthly budget sheet turns them into spending by category, net burn, cash and runway. A Budget vs actual sheet tracks your real numbers.

It opens in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers. Here are the inputs in the example. Swap in your own:

And here's what the formulas build, at three points in the year:

Read the burn line first. It more than triples in a year. The team grows from 3 to 11 people, and each hire brings a salary, taxes, tools and a laptop. Revenue grows too, but nowhere near as fast. That's normal after a seed round. The budget's job is to show it in advance, so the next raise starts on time.

What if the round is late?

Now change one input: the month the funding lands. Leave the hiring plan as it is.

With the round four months late, the cash runs out in month 7, a month before the money arrives. The hires and bills planned for months 4 to 7 are the reason. So tie the costs that depend on the round to the month it closes. Not the month you hope it will.

Which startup costs do founders forget?

In our work, the same three costs catch founders out. They're payroll taxes and benefits on every salary, software that grows with each hire, and one-off legal and setup bills. Each looks small on its own. Together they move runway by months. In our template, leaving them out would show 23.4 months of runway at month 12 instead of 17.7.

Payroll taxes and benefits

A salary isn't what a hire costs you. Employers pay taxes on top, and often benefits too. Here's what that adds to one hire in the US and the UK:

That's why our template adds 15% to every salary. Change it to match your country, your benefits and your payroll provider's numbers. In the UK, many employers can also claim the Employment Allowance. It takes up to £10,500 off the yearly National Insurance bill (HMRC). A payroll service works all this out each month, and our list of payroll services for startups compares the main ones.

Software that grows with your team

Most tools charge per seat: email, chat, design, code and now AI assistants. So every hire adds a handful of subscriptions. In our template, tools cost $2,100 a month at the start. With 11 people, they cost $3,700. Nobody decides to spend that. It just happens.

Some of it is waste. Zylo's 2026 index found that organisations leave 36% of their SaaS licences unused. Zylo tracks companies far bigger than a startup, but the leak looks the same at any size. Seats stay live after people leave, and two tools end up doing one job. Check your card statements every quarter and cancel what nobody uses.

One-off legal and setup costs

One-off costs don't show up in a monthly average, so they get missed. Think legal fees for your round, a laptop for every new hire, recruiter fees and a website rebuild. After a priced round, the company usually pays the lead investor's lawyers too, up to a cap. Our term sheet guide explains how that works.

Then there are yearly company costs. They're easy to forget, because they come round only once a year.

The Delaware tax catches founders out most. The default calculation uses your authorized shares. With 10 million of them, Delaware's authorized shares method gives a bill of $85,165. Recalculate with the assumed par value capital method, which is based on your assets, and the bill is usually far smaller. Delaware's own worked example comes to $1,600.

In our template, one-off costs add up to $63,450 over the year. Most of it lands in months 4 to 6, right after the round, just as the hiring starts.

What's the difference between a budget, a forecast and a financial model?

A budget is your plan: what you intend to earn and spend, month by month, for the next year. A forecast is your best guess of what will really happen, updated as actual numbers come in. A financial model is the engine behind both. It covers three to five years, is built from drivers and is used to raise money and test scenarios.

In larger companies, the same plan is called the operating budget. It's the number you're held to. After a priced round, your investors will usually get it every year as part of their information rights. The forecast moves every month. The model is what investors test before they invest.

The cleanest setup uses one set of drivers, so the first 12 months of your model become the budget. Our financial model examples show how a model is built, and 6 critical mistakes in financial models covers what breaks one. For the forecast side, see projections vs forecasts.

We build budgets and investor models as part of our financial modeling services. A model starts at $3,000, and complex ones cost $5,000–$15,000, as a flat fee agreed before work starts. Most take two to three weeks.

How do you track budget vs actuals each month?

Once a month, after your books close, put your real numbers next to the budget. For each line, work out the difference in dollars and as a share of the budget. Look into anything more than 10% off. Then update your forecast and your runway. Leave the budget itself alone, so it stays a fair yardstick.

1. Close the books — get last month's real revenue and costs from your accounting software. Our comparison of accounting software for startups covers the main tools.
2. Put actuals next to the budget — line by line, in the same categories. The template's Budget vs actual sheet does the maths.
3. Work out the difference — actual minus budget, then divide by the budget to get a percentage.
4. Explain every line more than 10% off — one sentence each: what happened, and whether it will happen again.
5. Update the forecast and the runway — then share them with your board, or in your monthly investor update.

Here's a month-3 review in the template, with made-up actual numbers:

Total spend is only 5% over budget. That looks fine, but it isn't. Two cost lines are well over, and revenue came in short, so burn is 12% higher than planned. A total on budget can hide lines that aren't. So read every line.

If nobody on your team owns this review, it's a good first job for a part-time finance lead.

How does your budget set your runway and your next raise?

Runway is how many months your cash will last: cash in the bank divided by your average monthly net burn. Your budget shows it for every month ahead, so you see the squeeze coming. SVB's rule of thumb is about 18 months of runway between rounds. Raise enough to cover that, and start raising before it runs low.

Watch how fast runway falls in the template. Right after the round, it looks like years. By month 12, it's 17.7 months. No money went missing. Burn grew as the team did.

Now add the time a raise takes. Carta found the median gap between a seed round and a Series A reached 616 days in Q2 2025. That's a little over 20 months. Say this company's Series A takes that long. It closes around month 24, with roughly six months of cash left at the latest burn. That's tight, and burn is still rising. So the budget says: start planning the Series A now, or slow the hiring.

The same maths sizes your next round. Say your budget for the next two years burns $130,000 a month on average. That's about $3.1M, before a cushion for the months the raise itself takes. Our seed round benchmarks show what rounds look like in 2026. Investors will also check how much burn each new dollar of revenue costs you. Our guide to capital efficiency explains that burn multiple.

We've seen what happens when a plan skips the cash. An AI adtech startup came to us after investors liked its pitch but didn't trust its model. The model had no cash planning: no cash flow and no use of funds. So the business seemed to make money from day one. Key tech costs were missing too, from storage and AWS infrastructure to LLM costs.

We rebuilt the model in a week, with a full payroll schedule: bonuses, commissions, recruitment fees and yearly raises. A month after we delivered it, the company closed its $6M seed round with a tier-one VC. Read the case.