Easy-to-Use Department Budget Template (SmartSuite Tutorial)
SmartSuite replaces spreadsheet budgeting with a customizable template that uses colors, emojis, and automated views to track department budgets faster. The tutorial shows how to set up the tool and hints at dashboards and automations for managing money with less manual work.
The 90s are like so back in style right now. And what perfect way to celebrate the 90s than to create a budget the same way we've been creating them since the 90s, aka spreadsheets. Wait, did I just hear you say you're going to be spending hours and hours building out a spreadsheet in Excel for budgeting? That's insane. Why? Why are you spending that long on it? That sounds like a really inefficient use of time. Well, yeah, no, probably. Probably not the most efficient. No. But I do really like the colors and I can make them all coordinate with our palette if I just go in and adjust every single cell to be in our exact color theme, which is really nice. And I know how to use Excel, so. Okay, I guess I kind of get it. So it's familiar. But when it comes to that spreadsheet, once it's done, has it actually worked out well for you? Have people been using it? Is it kind of a part of your organization to have that spread spreadsheet? Or is it like most companies that I've seen, where you have the spreadsheet and then people don't actually use it? Yeah, no, probably not. Like, if I'm being honest, I would say we usually have issues around the versioning. So like final, final, final, final, final, final, approved, final. It's hard to tell which of those finals is like the right file. So we just kind of go back and forth and we usually have like 14 versions of the budget, but I know which one's which and I don't know. I think there might be something with this spreadsheet. I'm going to really spend a lot of time on formatting this year to try to fix it. But every time I send the spreadsheet out to the sales team, it's like they open it and I think they're allergic to spreadsheets or something because like when they open this spreadsheet, they basically just go doe eyed and they just kind of close it and they say they've seen it, but they never edit it or touch it or like reference it ever. And well, I guess that could probably be better. So many of our team members, especially those who like, don't love the 90s revival here, are not all about that spreadsheet life. Like, they break out into hives just when they see this interface. But that's just because I haven't added enough colors yet. Yeah, okay, so that's what I thought. I mean, that's what I hear from most of the clients. We work with here at ProcessDriven, we have a lot of folks that need to make budgets that are for the team that isn't necessarily going to be inside of QuickBooks or Xero or Salesforce. And they just need a simple way to track what their department is spending or what their business is spending. And it sounds like that spreadsheet may not be the best solution. There are other options out there and there are tools that would allow you to have permissions, so that way you're not working inside that clunky spreadsheet permissions thing and everyone starts editing everything instead. You could restrict things by the field or by the row in your spreadsheet. There are also tools out there that just look a lot better so your team doesn't have to be allergic to opening the spreadsheet and actually using it. And by having it look better and function better, your team will actually be using it more regularly. So when it comes to tracking your actuals, it won't be like pulling teeth to figure out how much did marketing spend because it'll all be in there. And even if someone wanted to use your beautiful budget, if there are so many versions floating around that they have to manually go through long email chains to find they could have, you know, Budget 2023 approved, final, final, edited, final version, for real this time. Like, if that's the file name, how do they know which version to even use? If they wanted to actually use a spreadsheet and they weren't allergic to it and they understood how to use it and they didn't mess up the formatting. Like, even if all of those things worked out, that seems like a really hard way to go about it. I mean, are you open to trying something a little different this year? Well, I do know trends change and we're going from 90s to 80s, so I bought my Polaroid camera. So I guess in the spirit of change, I'm willing to give it a shot. Well, isn't that convenient? Because the sponsor of Today's video is SmartSuite, and it's actually a tool that's really well positioned to help you with this puzzle, to give you pretty formatting and data organization and allow you to track tasks all in one spot. And they have a free template and free everything else that would allow you to get all of this stuff set up by the time we finish going through this video. Okay. Smart. Sweet. Is that like that hotel chain, like the Hilton Suites kind of thing right now? Oh, picture. SmartSuite is kind of this hybrid between a task tool like Asana or Trello or Google. Keep your little task list and a spreadsheet data tool like Notion or Airtable or Excel, it's kind of right in between the two of those. So it allows you to organize data and tasks all together. And it comes preloaded with a bunch of templates that I'll actually show you on here that allows you to kind of save things up very, very quickly and reuse it in the future without having to spend 14 hours building out that new budget spreadsheet instead. You can use your time when budgeting to actually think about the budget and the substance and spend less time on formatting. Okay, well, it sounds like if I do this, I'd probably have a lot of extra time and actually have to do work. But how exactly do I get this template you're talking about? Hey, thanks for being open minded. Let's give it a shot and if you don't like it, we'll just scrap it and go back to the spreadsheet. No harm, no foul. So, first step of trying out this new approach is going to be to use our affiliate link. It doesn't cost you anything, but by using it, one, you support this channel. And two, if you contact SmartSuite after using that link and you decide to go to a paid plan in the future, then you can actually get a discount that's only provided here to process driven subscribers. So double benefit there. Use that affiliate link. That's your first step. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay. Nope, nope, nope. This sounds expensive. And I was specifically told to use the tools we already have and to not spend any money on making the budget. Otherwise I have to make a budget it for the budget, which is just way too much budget for me. Oh, I get why you'd be worried. I'm that way too. When it comes to videos about software, sometimes it can seem like it's like, oh my gosh, another $10,000 tool. That's not the case here. SmartSuite, like a lot of SaaS tools out there, works on a freemium model, meaning you can use all of this stuff for free. And if you want to use it a lot, a lot of the time, for a lot of information for whatever their thresholds are, then you can upgrade to a paid tier, kind of like Dropbox or other tools you might know. But no, there's no cost for any of this. Today the template is free. We're going to be using free plan features. No cost of entry here. This is the same cost as your spreadsheets. It just looks and works a lot better. Oh, okay. Well, I like a good deal. What's the next steps? Yeah, no, I get it. So now that you have that, step two is going to be following the instructions to finish creating your account, if you didn't already. So I have a video on that up here, but basically just fill in your information. Once you do that, you're going to see a page that looks something like this. Yours will be probably a lot more blank than mine, but we're going to click here on Add a new solution and and click Start with Template. When you click Start with Template, over in the top left, we're going to search for budget, if I can spell. And we're going to be looking for the budget template called Small Business Budget. Now, don't let the title of this template fool you. This template will show you how to organize a budget for any small organization. Whether your organization is a whole business, a whole nonprofit, or just a department within a larger organization, you're going to be good to go with this template here. It's got a lot of the basic stuff that you're going to need, and it'll save you a bunch of time over creating those manual spreadsheets. Once you find this template, click Use Template to add it into your account. And as our final step of installation, make sure you click like and subscribe on this YouTube video. You know, just because. Yes, here we are. We've got our Small Business Budget template. The first thing I want to do is do a little bit of cleanup and get rid of the budget changes section. This is kind of like a tab in the spreadsheet that allows us to track changes of our budget as things shift over time. For most organizations I work with, particularly one with the use case you've described in the past, this is going to be overkill. We can always add it in later if we need it. But I'm actually going to click up here and click Delete App to delete this tab of the spreadsheet to simplify things a little bit more, because I don't feel like we're going to be in a position where we need to track changes, at least at this point. So go ahead and click Delete App. Confirm that deletion. And that's just going to save simplify things a little bit more. So we end up with just two tabs. The second thing I want to do before we get started at all is to remove the filter that exists within this first app. Now, I know I'm throwing a lot of jargon at you. Just follow along here. First app is Budget. We're going to click on that inside here. We've got these things called views that allow us to view our information in different layouts. Now, you'll notice that our default view here, 2021, by quarter, has a filter that's all bright. This is letting us know that it's only showing us certain information that matches the criteria. In this case, it's showing us 2021, but we don't have any info for 2021. What I'm going to do, just to keep things a little bit simpler for us, is click up here to our views. So that's just clicking on this top area. Go over here, click on the three dots, and I'm going to delete this particular view because I don't really care to see things by quarter. And once again, I just want us to start with a very simple foundation. So go in here, click Delete View, and we should end up looking something like this, which says summary. And we'll revise things a bit further. But this gives us a good starting point. Are you following me so far? Oh, yeah. I like that a lot. Okay, okay. So this is looking pretty good, but obviously, like, I'm not planning a budget for the 90s, despite, you know, appearances. I'm planning on 2024. Like, how do I swap all this stuff out? Yeah, absolutely. Let's go through a few other cleanup items here then, just to make sure that this is now ready to go for both this year and the year in the future. One way we're going to do that is by removing things that have years in them from our overall layout. That way you can reuse this, whether it's 2025, 2028, 2020 30. Wait, 2020 30, any of that stuff. We can use the same templates. So let's start off by this big old heading here. It says 2021 summary. I'm going to double click on this to open the editable area and I'm going to backspace to rename this to be called All Budgets. The reason I'm going to do this is because I don't want things broken out by year, at least right now. I can do that in other ways if I need to. I want to keep it simple. So I'm going to stick with All Budgets as my view name while I'm in this view. Something I'm also going to rename is this one here where it says title. I'm going to double click again and I'm Going to rename this record title to be Budget just to say that this is one of the budgets that we are tracking. Everything that's in this column represents everything. A budget for a period of time. While I'm at it, I'm going to go to the overall tab, the app, give that a click and if I click on that little downward carrot here, I'm going to see this option. What should each record be called? This is another setting I just want us to calibrate to make our lives easier in the future. What this is asking is what is the meaning of each row in our spreadsheet? Well, as we've talked about, each row in our spreadsheet in this case is a budget. So I'm going to type in Budget here and rename that. You'll notice that over here it's now changed to say new budget and down here it now says add a new budget. This is just going to make it clearer for us in the future so we know what the heck we're tracking here. I'm going to click out of this area, it'll automatically save and I'm going to move over to my second app where I also want to make just a few tweaks to get us ready and future proofed for the years to come. Inside this budget items area, I'm going to click over on views once again. And once again I'm going to delete my expenses by quarter one. I just don't like how that looks. I don't use it that much. I'm going to delete it then under all expenses 20, 21, I'm just going to call this all budget items again, giving myself one summary with everything all included, not just making it year specific just to make my life easier. Clicking out of there, I can now see I've got my budget items outlined. Each of these rows in this particular spreadsheet represents an item, a category that I could be tracking my expenses for. I can then use these to report and of course have my budget and actual for each piece. You'll notice I have these kind of nested together in these groups that can toggle open and close to make my life easier. That's set up here by default. I don't need to touch anything here, but just calling that out in case you're curious. Just like we did in the Budget tab in Budget Items, I'm going to go up here, go into what we should call records and change this to items just to make things a bit clearer and then click out as I Notice things changed out. Now we've got our rough formatting all set up. What do you think? Let's keep going. Yeah, absolutely. To do that, let's just add in each of your budget categories here as a new record. We can even delete the ones that are there by default so you don't get them confused. Notice I'm clicking Shift Enter as it's prompted here to automatically create a new record and save myself time. Once I get, say, this first quarter plan, I can then fill in this month field. This is just a dropdown. This is going to be useful for reporting and it's also good if you end up planning budgets that aren't necessarily equivalent to a month or have a different name. So, for example, if this was marketing in February, this could be a nice cross reference. Once we have the month filled in, we can fill in quarter and year. I'm actually going to do that in bulk. Clicking here, clicking on quarter, it'll apply to all of them. And then clicking on year. In this case 2024, and it'll apply to all of them. Now. Next up, we have fields for budget and actual, and these are showing me errors. These are formula fields. And if I click on these formulas to see what's happening, it tells me that I'm subtracting my budget income from my budget expense. That all looks right. So why is it giving me an error? Well, I kind of know what the issue is here. So what I'm going to do is actually open up this budget and I'm going to tweak that formula. So I'm going to go in here and I see the ones with errors. If I give them a click, I'll notice that there's a particular area that looks really strange. It's this one right at the end. This is it trying to pull from that app we deleted. So because we made our lives simpler, we actually made it a bit harder here. So I'm just going to delete this stuff that doesn't exist. Click calculate again and we should see that error go away. Surely enough, there it is. I'm going to do the same thing on this one. I want it to stop trying to sum up the app that isn't there. I'm going to delete that, Click calculate and again, we'll fix this other side. Now both of our formulas are working properly and we're ready to keep moving. The next thing we have to do is actually add our budget and actuals into here. And if we go over to budget items, the easiest thing for us to do will be to start renaming these cells or adding in new items for what we actually track in our budget. For example, maybe in this case I don't really track any of these ones here. Like this isn't relevant to me. I delete these items. I don't track these kinds of expenses and instead I want to track expenses like payroll, which is an expense that is under our wages category. I'm going to connect it to January 2024 because that's the period I'm tracking. And My budget is 40,000 for this month. And I'm going to click. I can also then add the other ones that I want to track, such as let's track training in this case, this is also going to be for January 2024. This is a expense. I'm just going to change these categories to whatever is important for me when it comes to reporting. So in this case, this expense for training is going to go under team. I'm going to add my budget of 10,000 and my actual of zero and click save. And up here at the top we have two income areas. I'm actually going to rename this product number one, I'm going to say I want to have, you know, 90,000 in income from that and click save. And I'm going to delete the other one because I don't have another one to go ahead and add stuff for February. I'm probably going to make my life a little bit easier if I go into these product items, duplicate them so I have just a copy for next time. And for product number 1 4, in this case February. And I want to make, let's say 50,000 in February. I can save that, add that in and we'll see a new section appear inside my overall budget items area for February. And if any of this stuff feels tricky, just navigating the basics of smartsuite, it's normal, right? You've been using spreadsheets for years, if not decades, and so switching to something new is going to feel a little bit odd at first. But altogether, SmartSuite versus spreadsheet has a much lower learning curve. So for your other team members who won't touch that spreadsheet with a 10 foot pole, you're making life a lot easier for them because they can get in here, find what they need, not have that allergic reaction and actually start using this budget when they're adding in their own expenses or adding in their own, you know, budget items. If you'd like to move through the learning curve a little bit Faster. You can also work with me here at ProcessDriven, where we have our how to SmartSuite training course that walks you through how to be a productive member of a SmartSuite workspace in less than one day. So it's a pretty streamlined. Way faster than YouTube to just get the things you need to note down so you can use these core features and feel confident navigating your daily routines inside of SmartSuite. But enough of that for now. How you feeling on this particular build out? Hmm. Talk to me about colors. Like, this is great. It's probably pretty close to my spreadsheet, but I do know that colors help speak. My people kind of navigate this spreadsheet and find the stuff that they actually need. Like, how do I do that in here? Oh, okay. So let's set some colors up. We'll do one at a time. This time to set the first color, we can adjust the theme of the overall solution by going up to the top and clicking on again, the little carrot up here where we see solution, icon and color. Here's where you can kind of establish the theme for the page that you're on. So in this case, I think maybe we'll go budget. We'll make it turquoise. Why not? And we'll go under icon and we'll change this to a smiley face because we don't want a negative connotation of budget. So feel free to change it in your own as well. Okay, but what about, like, fields? So in my spreadsheet, I love to just take the fields that I want to pay attention to and I'll just manually go in and add colors for whatever people need to know about. So that way they pay attention to those fields. And that usually takes me like two days or so of my three day budgeting thing is just adding that palette. Like, despite wearing black and white, I like to see lots of splashes of color in my budget. Like, can we do that here? Because this looks very clean and modern and not 90s at all. Yeah, that's a super common request. When you're in a spreadsheet, you might be used to using conditional formatting or just manually coloring cells or rows based on things you want to see. And particularly for folks who set that up each and every time, it can be super time consuming. But we actually have a way to do that a little bit more easily. Inside of SmartSuite. Let me just show you what that looks like. Inside of either of these apps, we have the option to set spotlights in this template. We actually have A few of these already set up. And let me just show you one here. Inside this budget area, we have a conditional formatting. Set up a spotlight that says when the budget contains January, February or March, make it blue. When the budget contains April, May, or June, make it in this case green. And this is the kind of formatting we can have. You'll notice right here, the budget here says February and January, and this is now blue. Because of that, if I were to go in this spotlight and change this out to change this color to say yellow, we'll see the fields change here. If I'd like, I can also set up my own spotlights. Like, let's go over to budget items here, the other app. And I can set up a spotlight that says maybe when the actual is, let's say empty. When the cell is empty, let's make it red to remind ourselves, hey, we need to fill in this budget still. And I can either have that apply to just the field, meaning just the square, the cell, or the entire row, the entire item. In this case, I'll go with field. Once I have this spotlight set up, click out of here. Let's just delete an actual. Let's just pretend we forgot to fill this one in. We can see what happens here. If I change this spotlight so it applied to an entire item, the whole row will become red. And I can set these up, as many of them as I want with so many conditions that I can define for myself right here. To give me that conditional formatting without having to manually color cells one by one by one by copy and pasting formatting in a spreadsheet. Ooh, yeah. I mean, there's so much more you can do to change the look of this if you want to. Once you have the data in here, if you wanted to change this. So that way it was all a beautiful card view. So everything was kind of spread out. You could even have images on each of these cells. You can change their size. There's a lot you can do to change the look of this, depending on what you like to see by just changing the view type in this category here. Personally, I think for budgets, grid is generally a good spot to start. But if you have a lot of information, maybe making them a little bit better, bigger could be a nice way to adjust that formatting in case you'd rather see things in a different layout or in a different shape. The final tip I'll share is just adding emojis if you want to. We already added an icon into the overall solution, but if we want to, we can also add some emojis, some little icons into the content itself. Pretty much anywhere you can type text in SmartSuite, you can edit it. And if you can edit it and there's text, you can also add emojis by either copying and pasting from elsewhere on the Internet. Like for example, maybe you see an icon in the emojis in the comments below this video video. You could then copy and paste those emojis into SmartSuite. Or you could use the emoji keyboard that's built into most devices where for example, in Windows it's Windows key, period, hold the Windows key, click period, we open this emoji keyboard and I could have different emojis based on what I'd like to have. If I went simple and I just searched red, I could just have a red icon here. Same goes for every item, for every field name, for everything. If I wanted to have different icons added in, I certainly could. To make it more colorful and engaging and again, less scary to look at. Okay, I think I finished it like this took no time at all compared to my normal process, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. But now I have more time to spend time scrolling Instagram. So is there anything else I need to do before I just hand this over to the boss and say, yep, got a new template. Save me tons of time. I'm amazing. Like anything else, I need to be doing well. There's always more you can do kind of like a spreadsheet there. This is just the basic, basic features. We could go in here and we could add automations that automatically send emails based on when a budget actual is added. We could go in here and we could play with some of the dashboards to build dynamic reports that will give pivot tables a run for their money and show us how our numbers are shaken out on different timescales using the chart views or the dashboards. We can build right inside of SmartSuite and we can build these out based on whatever numbers you want to see and report on. And we could also talk about other areas of the business around the budget that we could bring into SmartSuite as well, such as how is expense approvals being managed, how are people getting corporate cards, how are people being notified about the budget changing, how are team members able to track their own training costs and investments? All of these different little programs, we could talk about bringing them into SmartSuite and connecting this budget thing with where the budget is actually spent and where work actually happens. I Think all of those would be three really viable ways to accept. Expand upon this template if you want to. I want all of those, like now give them to me. Yeah, I get where you're coming from. I'm the same way. I want to just keep going here. But the downside of being in 2023 is we have all these cool tools, but According to the YouTube overlords, we don't have the attention spans to learn them. Which is why ProcessDriven, we create the how to SmartSuite mini course to teach you SmartSuite super fast. Because folks don't have the time to sit here and learn all of these options. In fact, YouTube tells me that at least 50% of the people watching this video are already multitasking or flipping to another tab or moving on to something else by this point in the video. So if I were to go on, very few people will actually see it. So I think we probably need to leave Those expansions option 1, 2 and 3 for another time. Ooh, I love that idea. Okay, if anybody here would like to see a part 2 to this video where we go into one of these expansion options, all you have to do is go back to the 80s. Now grab your Polaroid photo or use an Instagram filter and just take a photo of this screen and tag ProcessDrivenon YouTube. And then no, again, we are in 2023 here. You can just leave a comment below. Yeah, okay, Boomer, just write your comment below. So innovative. Really creative. Ms. YouTuber lady. Oh, oh, one more thing, one more thing. You know how this channel is like super boring? Like maybe you, like, maybe you subscribe. I don't know. I know 70% of you don't subscribe, so like, you know what's up. But that other chick, she's kind of boring and she's always talking about these processes and systems and boring stuff. But I want to remind everybody here that like, the reason we need to do this stuff and build out our templates and re examine our day to day workflows is so that we can bring more fun and creativity and calm or just fun into your day to day workflows. So if that sounds like something you'd enjoy, do, subscribe. Be part of that weird 30% who's like, willing to put up with boring lady to get good content. And until we talk next, don't forget to ensure enjoy the process. Oh God, I'm already embarrassed. You haven't even filmed yet. Well, this is definitely the weirdest thing I've ever done on YouTube. I think.
