Marketing budget template: planning spend you can defend

A marketing budget template turns a plan into numbers: what each channel costs, when the money goes out, and what you expect back. Its real function is not control — it is making trade-offs visible, so the decision to spend on one thing is recognisably a decision not to spend on another.

The version most companies build understates costs in the same two places: it omits the cost of people's time, and it forgets that production is usually more expensive than distribution. The result is a budget that looks affordable and a quarter that overruns without anyone knowing why.

What the template needs

• A row per channel, with the activities beneath it rather than one aggregate line.
• Media or platform spend: advertising, sponsorships, listings, placements.
• Production: design, writing, video, photography — whether bought in or done internally.
• Tools and subscriptions, allocated to the channel that requires them.
• People's time, costed at a realistic internal rate. This is the line that changes conclusions.
• Agency or freelancer fees, with the retainer separated from project work.
• Monthly phasing rather than an annual total, because cash goes out unevenly and campaigns cluster.
• An expected result per channel — enquiries, signups, meetings — so cost per outcome is calculable.
• A contingency line, because something will cost more than planned and an unbudgeted overrun becomes an argument.

Cost internal time or you will systematically over-invest in the channels that look free. Two days a week producing content is roughly a quarter of a salary; compare that honestly against a paid campaign before concluding that organic is cheaper. It often still is — but the comparison has to be real.

Building it

1. Start from the plan's channels. A budget for a channel that is not in the plan is a channel nobody decided on.
2. For each, list activities and cost each one separately — media, production, tools, time.
3. Phase by month. Annual totals hide the quarter where three campaigns and an event coincide.
4. Add expected outcomes per channel, even roughly. Without them the budget cannot be reviewed, only spent.
5. Set a percentage contingency and protect it, rather than allocating it in advance.
6. Agree who can commit spend at what level, and put the thresholds in writing.
7. Track actuals against the budget monthly, in the same categories you planned in — this is where most budgets fall apart, because actuals arrive categorised differently.
8. Review quarterly with the outcome column filled in, and move money between channels rather than only asking for more.

Planned against actual

A budget that is never compared to what was spent is a wish. The comparison is only possible if your marketing categories match the accounts your bookkeeping uses — which is a decision to make once, at the start, and a painful retrofit afterwards. Agree the category names with whoever keeps the books before the first invoice, and the monthly review becomes a filter rather than a reconstruction.

The plan and the model belong in Ettex Sheets — formulas, monthly phasing, charts of spend against plan, pivots by channel — and the actuals live in Ettex Books: a chart of accounts structured the way accountants expect, so marketing categories are real accounts rather than notes; categories and auto-categorisation rules so recurring tool subscriptions file themselves consistently; attachments on any entry so the invoice sits with the transaction; multi-currency with rate tracking for platforms billing in another currency; instant search across all periods; and P&L and ledger export as PDF, CSV or XLS to compare against the plan. The written plan around the numbers sits in Ettex Docs, and supplier agreements go through Ettex Signature.

Said plainly: Ettex Books has no budgeting module. There is no budget-versus-actual view, no variance reporting and no forecast built in — you keep the budget in a spreadsheet and compare it against exported actuals each month. Nor is there any advertising-platform integration, so spend does not flow in automatically. That is a manual monthly step; for a marketing budget reviewed monthly it takes minutes, and it is worth knowing before you expect otherwise.

Where marketing budgets go wrong

• Internal time excluded, which makes organic channels look free and distorts every comparison.
• One aggregate marketing line, so nobody can tell which channel consumed the money.
• Annual totals with no monthly phasing, hiding the cash squeeze in the quarter everything lands.
• Production costs underestimated — the video is rarely the cheap part.
• Categories that do not match the bookkeeping, making planned-versus-actual a manual reconstruction.
• Tool subscriptions never reviewed, quietly accumulating across years.
• No expected outcome per channel, so the review has nothing to judge except whether the money was spent.
• Contingency allocated in advance, which means there is none.

A marketing budget template is worth building when it includes time, phases by month, and uses the same categories as your books. Then the quarterly question becomes which channel to move money to, rather than how much more to ask for.