Best Business Budgeting Software of April 2023

PlanGuru offers much more detailed budgeting and forecasting features than typical accounting software does. For example, instead of guessing what an account budget should look like any given month, you can create custom projection formulas based on financial and non-financial drivers. Just be aware that building these formulas and identifying relevant drivers might be a learning process.

Float’s functionality doesn’t get quite as granular as PlanGuru does, but for business owners who want a more user-friendly experience, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The software has a clean user interface and analyzes historical accounting data to suggest budget values for you if you’re not sure where to start. This is a plus for business owners who need more features than their accounting software offers but are still relatively new to budgeting. The app also helps businesses plan for worst-case scenarios with a dedicated tool that shows how certain events, like losing a valuable client, would affect cash flow.

If you’re a visual person, Centage Planning Maestro’s dashboard does a great job of displaying revenue percentage by department, along with yearly financial comparisons and monthly trends. The amount of information can be overwhelming at first, but business owners who take a more in-depth approach to financial planning and analysis will appreciate it. In addition to your typical revenue and expense planning, the software lets you import data from your HR software to set budgets for each employee. This is especially helpful if you run a larger small business with a considerable workforce.

If you already use Xero for accounting, you’ll be happy to know that simple budgeting features are at the tips of your fingers. Just keep in mind that long-term cash flow predictions require a subscription to the highest-tier Established plan. Before you can run reports, you need to enter budgets for each of your accounts. Xero speeds up the process by letting you use preset formulas that adjust an account’s budget by a fixed amount or percentage each consecutive month. Once that’s finished, you can run the budget variance report or even add a budget column to a separate report, like your profit and loss statement, to compare numbers.

QuickBooks Online’s Plus and Advanced plans come with basic tools that’ll familiarize you with the budgeting and forecasting process. To start out, choose the fiscal year you want to budget for and whether you want to see results separated by quarter, month or year. Once the budget has been created, the budgets vs. actuals report will compare your actual account balances vs. projected balances side by side. QuickBooks Online forecasts your cash flow, too, and lists all of the future events and predictions that the forecast is based on. From there, you can edit a future event to see how it would change your forecasted balance.