If you’ve been building your company’s structure in Excel for the past few years, you may have created an expense spreadsheet template. The question is, do you need one? The answer is that you do not unless you are going to use it more than once per year. Let’s look at why you may not want to use an expense spreadsheet template.
To start with, you are only using the expenses on a cost basis. That means that you don’t know what those expenses were, they may have been for customer support, or business training or consultancy. When you use a cost basis, it can be difficult to keep track of each expense. You could, for example, make a claim and realize that you had spent the same amount of business training as you had on customer support. But you had made no real effort to determine which you spent more on, so how can you accurately calculate the difference?
The next reason to avoid expense spreadsheet templates is that you could still wind up in trouble. You have different expenses for different numbers of hours worked. You have different employees working in the same way, but different numbers of hours.
For example, you have a few employees, but two employees have come and gone. This makes it difficult to track when they are working, and when they are working when you have fewer hours for them to work.
The best reason to stick with a cost basis is that you can still enter the information into an expense spreadsheet template. Just make sure that it is a little more detailed than just the hours worked, but you can still include this as part of the Excel document.
If you do want to use an expense spreadsheet template to keep track of what you have spent, you are going to need some sort of system for entering these. The key here is to make sure that you use a system that is going to make the process of entering your data more accurate. It’s possible to buy software that allows you to enter the data in a very simple way, but if you cannot, you will need to find a better method of entering the data.
If you are going to use an expense spreadsheet template, be sure to use it as a backup for your spreadsheet. Otherwise, you will be running into all kinds of problems.
