Control every department budget in spreadsheets

As a financial controller, one of your main tasks is keeping the company budget under control. To do so, it is necessary to set out a maximum budget per department. Every department has its own fixed expenses, and of course some unplanned ones as well.

This is why you need an easy way to monitor and manage these department budgets. Avoid surprises and set up a clear budgeting strategy from the beginning of the quarter.

Spreadsheets are still the easiest and most flexible tools to use for financial purposes. Since you are the financial manager and control the entire company budget, you like to have everything in one place. What if a single spreadsheet could manage all of your finances?

Department budget control in spreadsheets

Determine each department budget and list it down into a single sheet. From there on, you can distribute each department budget to all department heads in your company. In their turn, they fill out their department spreadsheets with the actual expenses. Lastly, that data gets sent back to your master spreadsheet automatically.

Follow the steps below to do this one-time set up that will help you automate your budget control.

Step 1: Install Sheetgo

Install Sheetgo by clicking the button below.

Once inside the web application, create the first connection to distribute your department budgets. To do so, simply click on Connect.

Step 2: Select your data source

Select your master spreadsheet (the one where you set the company budget and monitor all expenses) as the spreadsheet you will send data from.

In this step, you want to simply send each department’s individual budget.

Step 3: Select your data destination

Sheetgo will automatically create a folder with the distributed spreadsheets. Choose in this step whether or not you want Sheetgo to create a new folder. It can be an already existing folder from inside your Drive as well.

After that, select from which column you create the distribution. Here this is the column that identifies the different departments in your company. Based on this column and amount of different values in it, Sheetgo creates a number of new spreadsheets named after these exact values.

Don’t forget to give the newly created folder a name. On top of that, under Destination tab, enter a tab name. This will be the same in every destination sheet and it will also be the name of the connection.

Step 4: Save the connection

Finally, click on Finish and save to create the distribution. Your company budget defined per department is now automatically sent to all of these respective department spreadsheets.

This is a one-time setup. In other words, whenever you change anything in the determination of your budget, it will automatically update each department spreadsheet.

Step 5: Bring back actual expenses

Set up a Consolidate from a folder connection, that will bring back the actual expenses made by your department heads, to your master spreadsheet. This way, you have a clear overview of your planned versus actual expenses.

Conclusion

This is how you use Sheetgo to automate budgeting in spreadsheets. Keep track of each department’s budget and the overall expenses of your company. Take a look at our Income statement template if you want to easily monitor profit and loss in Google Sheets.