Free Project Budget Templates for Cost Tracking in Excel & ClickUp (2024)

Creating project budgets from scratch? My favorite! Said no project manager ever. 😅

How many times have you dealt with inaccurate project cost estimates? Unless you’ve been using project budget templates from the get-go, you know the feeling of watching expenses creep ever further past your projected total cost.

Your budget should be easy to manage, customize, understand, and update—even when you need to account for unexpected cost overrun and adjust.

That’s where project budget templates come in! 🌻

They can’t do all the work for you, but a simple project budget template can be a game changer. Once you have a good outline, you can focus on determining project expenses and creating a reliable budget plan.

We rounded up 10 free project budget templates for Excel and ClickUp, so all you need to do is pick a winner.

What Is a Project Budget Template?

A project budgeting template provides a structure to plan and track all the costs for a project. By estimating the total costs of the tasks and resources required for your project’s life cycle, you can accomplish your goal on budget (and on time).

Project budget templates keep the budgeting process easy and organized, giving you features like:

• Exportable, downloadable spreadsheets for easy sharing and updates
• Visual representations of your budget and expense categories
• Easy-to-follow budget worksheets for tracking and estimating expenses and material costs

The best templates will help you optimize resource allocation, track expenses, identify areas where you can save, and create realistic goals.

Project management budget templates can also offer time-tracking capabilities, dependency warnings, priority labels, custom statuses, and task assignments to keep your project running smoothly.

What to look for in a project budget template

You want the best tools and templates to make successful project plans a reality. After all, they’re supposed to simplify the life of a project manager, not complicate it.

Here are some things to look for in simple project budget templates:

• Affordable: Small businesses need to put their money into projects, which means finding free budget templates and spreadsheet software 💸
• Straightforward: You and your team members should be able to get an at-a-glance view of your budget
• Customizable: Every project is different, and you’ll likely need to create a few custom fields
• Dynamic: Project budgets are living documents that you’ll need to update in real-time
• Shareable: Collaboration is key! You should be able to share your budget with stakeholders, team members, and anyone else involved

Above all else, you want a project budget template that works for you. Managing project budgets is hard enough without working around unwieldy templates that don’t do what you need.

10 Free Project Budget Templates in Excel & ClickUp

We’ve highlighted a wide range of project budget templates, and they’re all free. So grab a drink, kick up your feet, and get ready to meet the template of your dreams.

1. ClickUp Project Budget Template with WBS

Are you preparing for a complex project? If so, ClickUp’s Project Budget with WBS template is a dream come true. ✨

Use this project management budget template to create a detailed work breakdown structure and chunk your project into manageable components. It’s designed to help you track project spending, organize your project data, and map out cost estimates.

Project managers can use this template to ensure every dollar is accounted for. And it’s simple to use whether you’re starting a new project or taking the reins on an existing one.

ClickUp is one of the best OKR software tools on the market, so you’ll have access to a ton of additional project management features. We’ve got you covered with everything from collaboration tools to remote team management to simple budget proposal templates.

2. ClickUp Marketing Budget Template

Marketing budgets are integral to the success of today’s business, and the ClickUp Marketing Budget Template simplifies the process of planning and managing your marketing efforts.

Ensure your marketing dollars go to the right places, monitor your spending, and track your project controls and deliverables.

Use this free budget template to maximize your ROI, identify potential savings, and create a top-down view of your marketing activities and their costs. It can do everything from tracking progress against KPIs to calculating individual costs.

Stay on top of your project’s budget with the tools to set goals, review past performance, calculate your budget, allocate your funds, monitor progress, and make real-time adjustments. And do it all with the help of ClickUp Automations to eliminate some of the busy work for everyone involved.

3. ClickUp Business Budget Template

The ClickUp Business Budget Template lets you simplify your project and create a budget with detailed breakdowns and handy project management tools. 🧰

ClickUp’s finance project management software tools create a roadmap to success, giving you the automations and customization options you need every step of the way. It’s never been easier to identify areas for optimization, manage your cash flow, and track project performance.

This template is designed to centralize your business expenses and revenue to keep your project on track.

You’ll have access to ClickUp’s robust project management features too. So you can collaborate with your team throughout the project’s lifecycle, assign project tasks, and keep track of progress across the board.

4. ClickUp Event Budget Template

If you’re organizing an event, take some of the weight off your shoulders with the ClickUp Event Budget Template.

Ensure your expenses and resources are properly managed whether you’re planning for a corporate gathering, conference, product launch, or trade show. This template will help you set goals and budgets, track expenses and labor costs, and analyze your estimated budget.

Most importantly, this will help ensure you deliver a successful event every time. 🤩

This free project budgeting template makes planning, managing, and tracking your event easy with custom statuses, fields, views, and project management tools.

You’ll start by adding the template to your Free Forever ClickUp Workspace. From there, you can invite relevant members and take full advantage of this budget template from your start date to the big day and beyond.

5. ClickUp Budget Proposal Template

If you’re creating a budget proposal, we don’t need to tell you how stressful it can be. But the ClickUp Budget Proposal Template can make it more manageable.

Ensure your finances are in order and easy to understand so it’s easier to convey the plan to your stakeholders. And have an accurate estimated cost, so your next meeting with them is about something other than going over budget.

This template has clear visuals to make it easy to create a top-down view of project costs and a defined roadmap from start to finish.

It’ll walk you through information gathering, timeline creation, cost calculation, creating your final budget proposal, and any necessary revisions to keep your information up to date. 📅

You’ll also have access to a ton of project management and finance tools, and every team member can have a custom dashboard. Use these tools to improve budget proposal tracking, project constraint management, collaboration, and project planning.

6. ClickUp Budget Report Template

Budgeting is time-consuming. Do it faster with the ClickUp Budget Report Template.

Use this template to track progress against goals in real time, explain discrepancies between your planned and actual budget, and create a detailed overview of your past and present finances.

We created this template to give you control of your finances, whether you’re a small business or a sizable enterprise. It allows you to quickly organize, understand, and communicate your budget information, and it’s an excellent option for project budgeting.

It’ll help you gather data, create your budget report, enter the data, check for accuracy, and update your info in real time.

7. ClickUp Marketing Budget Template

Marketing budgets are integral to the success of today’s business, and the ClickUp Marketing Budget Template simplifies the process of planning and managing your marketing efforts.

Ensure your marketing dollars go to the right places, monitor your spending, and track your project controls and deliverables.

Use this free budget template to maximize your ROI, identify potential savings, and create a top-down view of your marketing activities and their costs. It can do everything from tracking progress against KPIs to calculating individual costs.

Stay on top of your project’s budget with the tools to set goals, review past performance, calculate your budget, allocate your funds, monitor progress, and make real-time adjustments. And do it all with the help of ClickUp Automations to eliminate some of the busy work for everyone involved.

8. Excel Project Budget Template by ProjectManager

The Excel Project Budget Template will help you organize the financial details for your project with a simple layout.

It’s a Microsoft Excel template, so you can easily color-code your items, input formulas, and monitor your finances. Once you’ve taken advantage of this free download, you can immediately create your project budget and fill in the template’s fields.

Get at-a-glance visual confirmation when you’re in the red or staying on budget, and share the document with your team members to keep everyone on the same page.

You can use this free project budget template and all of ProjectManager’s extra tools for 30 days for the free trial period. After that, you can sign up for as little as $13/month.

9. Excel Monthly Budget & Cost Tracking Template

Want a super-simple monthly budget with no frills? The Excel Monthly Budget template from Microsoft will do the trick. ✅

This customizable budget spreadsheet template displays your income or budget, the percentage of monthly income spent, and a summary of your expenses in one place. Check the current subtotals for each spending category in the Monthly Income and Expenses tabs for a more detailed look.

If you’re Excel-savvy, customizing this template beyond the expense summary and chart is simple, making it easy to manage complex projects with lots to keep track of.

Whether you’re creating a budget for a small business project or something bigger, this template has you covered. And it’s straightforward enough to use for personal budgeting!

10. Excel Detailed Project Budget Template by Vertex42

If you want to create a detailed spreadsheet, the Excel Detailed Project Budget Template might be what you’re looking for. It’s free and compatible with Excel and Google Sheets, perfect for collaboration between team members.

Create a detailed project budget complete with a WBS for large and complex projects, a basic or monthly project budget to keep things simple, or both for a comprehensive look at your finances.

Vertex42 designed this template for use with various projects ranging from home remodeling to large IT projects, with everything in between. And you’ll find other free downloads for things like earned value management to round out your Excel sheets.

In addition to Vertex42’s free templates, you can pay for premium Excel and Google Sheets templates to get the solutions you need to scale your business.

Track Your Project Budget from Start to Finish

A successful project budget is crucial for success, and it requires careful expense planning, tracking, and monitoring. Project managers everywhere know how difficult it is to organize everything.

With one of these free templates, you’ll create a realistic budget, identify risks, and adjust as needed to avoid overspending and delays.

Whether you need a detailed or simple project budget template, find one that lets you prioritize expenses and make informed decisions when allocating your funds. You’ll have an easier time identifying cost-saving opportunities and communicating your plans to stakeholders in an easy-to-understand format.

ClickUp makes all this easier with browser, desktop, and app functionality, plus a suite of collaboration tools for teams of all sizes. We also have 1,000+ integrations with popular project management tools to bring all your work together in one dashboard.

Users with ClickUp’s Free Forever plan get access to tons of templates, views, and customization options. So what are you waiting for? Sign up for ClickUp now! 🏃