An April to March plan, in one file.

Most annual budgets in startups are built by one person in a spreadsheet in the last fortnight of March. The founder sets the revenue number, the costs are last year's plus a percentage, and the hiring plan is a list of roles with no start dates. It gets approved, and by June nobody remembers what it said.

This template is laid out to push against that. Revenue is built from drivers the sales or operations lead can own, like customers and price or billable hours and rate, rather than typed as a growth rate. Every person and every planned hire is a row with a start month, so the cost of hiring in June rather than April is visible. And the cash sheet flags any month where the plan takes cash below the minimum you've set, before the plan is approved rather than after.

It opens with a worked example for a fictional software company with three revenue lines and about 24 people, so every sheet shows real calculations from the start. Replace the example with your own business.

1. 01Settings first. The opening bank balance should be your best estimate of cash on 1 April, reconciled across accounts. The minimum cash balance is a line you choose; at least one payroll plus the statutory dues that follow it is a sensible floor for most early-stage companies.
2. 02Targets next, before any numbers. Agree three to five with your leadership team and put a name beside each. If a target doesn't have an owner, it isn't a target.
3. 03Revenue. Replace the example lines with yours and enter the driver and price for each month. Put in seasonality where your business has it, and price changes in the month they take effect.
4. 04Headcount. List everyone currently employed with start month 1, then add planned hires with realistic start months. Hiring always takes longer than planned, so a role you want in April usually starts in June.
5. 05Other costs. Budget by category and team, including GST on inputs you can't recover. Annual payments go in the month they're paid.
6. 06Check the P&L and Cash sheets. If cash falls below the minimum in any month, the Check row says so. Change the plan, not the minimum.

Step six is where the useful conversations happen. A plan that breaks the minimum in September forces a choice: hire later, spend less, grow revenue faster with a specific action, or plan a fundraise with enough lead time. Each of those is a legitimate answer. Finding out in September isn't.

The Targets sheet has room for more than five rows, and the temptation is to fill them. Don't. A plan with twelve targets has no priorities, and a leadership team asked to watch twelve numbers will watch the two they already cared about.

Good targets are few, measurable from data you already collect, and owned by someone who can actually move them. Revenue belongs to whoever runs sales. Gross margin belongs to whoever runs delivery or operations. A cash floor belongs to the founder. 'Improve customer experience' belongs to nobody until it becomes something like 'monthly churn at or below 1.5%', with a named owner and a source for the number.

Quarterly milestones matter more than they look. A full-year target that's 40% behind in October gives nobody anything to do. A Q2 milestone missed by 8% in July is a conversation with time left to act on it.

Costs on top of CTC. In India, CTC figures often already include the employer's PF contribution and sometimes a gratuity component, so the real monthly cost of an employee can be close to CTC divided by twelve. But not always. Some companies quote CTC excluding employer PF, and very few include recruitment fees, equipment or insurance top-ups.

The template adds a single percentage on top of CTC for every row. The example uses 5%, which suits a company whose CTC already includes employer PF and gratuity and needs to add insurance, laptops and benefits. If your CTC figures exclude employer contributions, the percentage needs to be higher.

The cash view is intentionally simple. Receipts follow revenue after the number of days customers take to pay, rounded to whole months, so with 45 days entered, which rounds to two months, April's revenue is collected in June. For the first months of the year, when revenue from before the plan is still being collected, it uses the monthly revenue you entered in Settings. Costs are paid in the month they fall.

That's enough to show the shape of the year and whether the plan is fundable. It deliberately leaves out GST and TDS timing, capital spending, deposits, loans and fundraising, all of which move actual cash. If the Cash sheet shows you getting close to the minimum, that's the signal to build a proper 13-week cash forecast for the months that matter.

Keep the approved plan fixed. The temptation, when a quarter goes badly, is to update the plan to match reality. Resist it. A plan that moves with the actuals always looks on track, and you lose the one thing a plan is for: showing how far the year has moved from what you intended.

Instead, each month, enter actual revenue, direct costs, people costs, other costs and the closing bank balance on the Plan vs actual sheet, choose the month, and review the variances with the owners of each target. Anything above a threshold you agree in advance, say 10%, gets a one-line explanation and an action.

Each quarter, copy the file and build a forecast for the rest of the year in the copy. Now you have the plan, the actuals and the latest view side by side, which is exactly what a board or an investor will want to see.

• ·Every planned hire starting in April.
• ·Revenue growing smoothly every month in a business that plainly has seasons.
• ·Price rises assumed from the first month with no volume effect.
• ·Costs entered before GST in a business that can't recover it.
• ·The Check row showing a breach, and the minimum cash figure lowered to make it go away.
• ·Plan rows overwritten with actuals in July.

None of these is a spreadsheet problem. They're planning habits, and the template is designed to make each one easier to catch.