Marketing Budget Planner

What this tool does

CM8-378 holds the whole marketing budget — people, media, content, events, tools and agencies — line by line and month by month. It tracks planned against actual, works out how much is already committed, and answers the question that arrives without warning every year: if we had to cut this by twenty percent, what could actually go?

Everything runs inside this single file — no account, no upload, no network request of any kind.

The whole budget, not the media budget

Most conversations about marketing spend are conversations about advertising, which is often less than half of it. Salaries, tools, agency retainers and content production are all marketing spend, and leaving them out produces two problems: the total is wrong, and the flexible part looks much larger than it is.

A media planner is the right tool for allocating advertising across channels. This one sits above it, and the advertising is one category inside it.

What one row is

One row is one budget line in one month. That is more rows than a single annual figure per line, and it is what makes the monthly view, the variance and the pacing possible.

Put annual costs in the month they are actually invoiced rather than spreading them evenly. Tool licences billed in January are a January cost; smoothing them hides a real cash pattern and makes every monthly variance wrong.

Always on against campaigns

• Always on — runs whether or not there is a campaign: salaries, tools, the search advertising that never stops, the agency retainer.
• Campaign — tied to a specific push, and stops when it does.
• One-off — a project or a purchase: a rebrand, a research study, a stand.

The balance is worth setting deliberately, because it is usually an accident. A budget that is almost entirely always-on has no room to do anything new; one that is almost entirely campaigns has no foundation for the campaigns to land on. Somewhere around half and half is common, and there is no right answer — only a decision that should be conscious.

What is actually cuttable

Tick could still be stopped on anything not contracted, ordered or already spent. Everything else is committed, and committed money is gone whether or not the activity happens.

This is the number people are most often wrong about. Salaries, annual licences, agency notice periods, event deposits and long-lead print are all committed months before they are spent, and in most marketing budgets they add up to well over half the total.

Reading variance

Over ten percent is worth a note; over twenty is worth a conversation. The tool compares actuals only against the months that have actuals, so a year that is a quarter old is not reported as 75% underspent.

Underspending is not saving

This is the finding most budget reviews get backwards. A line at 40% of plan looks like prudence and is usually a failure: the activity did not happen, the results it was meant to produce did not arrive, and next year the line will be cut on the strength of not having been used.

The sample has one — a content programme underspent because the writer left and was not replaced. The money saved is real and so is the content that was never published.

Underspending by more than 30% is flagged as badly underspent, in the same red as overspending, deliberately.

Share of revenue

Reported because it is the figure a board will ask for. Treat it as a description of what you spend rather than a target worth hitting: published industry figures vary from about two percent to well over twenty depending on sector, stage and whether the figure includes salaries — which it usually does not, making most comparisons meaningless.

The useful version of the question is not "what do other people spend" but "what does the next unit of spend return", and that is a channel profitability question rather than a budget one.

The cutting table

The most useful page in this tool, and the one to have ready before it is asked for. It takes the planned total, works out what a five, ten, twenty or thirty percent cut would need to find, and compares it against what is genuinely still cuttable.

The answer is frequently that a twenty percent cut is not possible without breaking a contract, and it is far better to know that in advance than to discover it in the meeting. It also changes how much you commit early in the year.

Keep the lines you cut

Mark a dropped line as cut rather than deleting it. It keeps the decision visible, it stops the same proposal being re-made every quarter, and at the next budget round the list of what was cut last year is the most useful document in the room.

What this is not

• It is not an accounting system and it will not reconcile to a ledger. Accruals, prepayments and invoice timing all differ from what this records.
• It says nothing about whether the spend worked. A budget tracker measures discipline, not return.
• It does not handle multiple currencies.
• It has no view on whether the budget is the right size.

Printing and sharing

The Report tab prints the tiles, charts and both tables with a title block you fill in. The category table is the monthly review; the cutting table is what to bring to a budget conversation.

Saving your work

The budget is held in this browser, on this computer, and stays there between visits. Use the backup button to write a JSON file you control; the spreadsheet download gives finance the same rows.

Accuracy & disclaimer

Every figure here is one you entered. The tool adds, compares and totals; it has no view on whether a line is worth its money and does not connect to any accounting system.