Every November someone sits across a desk from me, or on the other end of a video call, and tells me the plan for next year. It is always a single number. “I want to do £200,000.” I ask what it costs to open the doors each month and what they need to take home. There is a pause, then a guess, then a promise to look it up.
A turnover target is a wish. A budget is twelve columns showing what the business expects to bring in, what it has committed to spend and what is left for the owner and for HMRC. Most small firms have the first and believe they have the second.
November is the right month to build one for 2027. There are ten months of this year’s figures to work from and enough time left to change a price or drop a cost before January.
Begin with the bills that arrive regardless
Sales are the hardest line to predict, so leave them until later. Start with the costs that turn up whether or not a single customer does: rent, wages, software, insurance, loan repayments, the accountant, the phone contract. Pull twelve months of bank transactions and list them. Annual renewals count too, placed in the month they fall.
Take a small service business as an illustration. Its list comes to £4,200 a month. That total surprises most owners, usually upwards, because direct debits get signed one at a time and nobody adds them up afterwards.
Pay yourself on paper first
The line most often missing from a small business budget is the owner. People treat their own income as whatever is left, which is how a busy year ends with a director who has paid everyone except themselves. Put the amount you need to live on into the budget as a cost, every month, whether it reaches you as salary, dividends or drawings. In our example that is £3,000.
Tax gets its own line as well. Corporation Tax or the Self Assessment bill is a known consequence of making a profit, and a plan that ignores it overstates what the business can afford. How much to set aside varies from one business to the next and is a conversation to have with a bookkeeper or accountant. Say £800 a month here.
Now the business has a number it must cover before anything else happens: £8,000 a month.
A sales figure with substance
Here the sum runs backwards. If this business keeps 50p of every pound it sells after materials and subcontractors, it needs £16,000 of sales a month to cover that £8,000. Last year it averaged £14,500.
So the honest budget starts £1,500 a month short, and the owner learns that in November instead of from the overdraft next summer. There are only a few ways to close the gap: raise prices, sell more, improve the margin, trim the fixed list or accept lower pay. Each can be tested in the spreadsheet in minutes.
A defensible sales assumption is last year’s actual result, adjusted only for things that can be named:
- A customer who has already left, or one who has already signed
- A price rise with a start date
- A new service with a realistic launch month
- Capacity, meaning the hours or units the business can physically deliver
Anything beyond that is optimism, and optimism belongs in a separate column labelled “stretch”.
Twelve months that look nothing alike
Dividing the year by twelve produces a budget that is wrong every month. Most businesses have a rhythm: a slow January, a dead August, a December that either doubles or vanishes. Use last year’s monthly pattern to shape the sales line. Costs have a calendar too, with insurance in March, a tax payment in January and the software renewal nobody remembers until it leaves the account.
A budget shaped like the real year also shows in advance which months will be thin, so a quiet January gets planned for in November.
Dead by February
Most budgets I come across were abandoned within eight weeks. The spreadsheet gets built in a burst of new-year energy. January ends. The books for January are not finished until March, because receipts are missing and the bank has not been reconciled. By the time anyone could compare plan with reality, the plan feels like ancient history and the file is never opened again.
What killed it was the absence of actual figures to set beside it. A budget with no actuals is a guess nobody marks.
Thirty minutes a month
A budget earns its keep in a monthly review, and the review only works if the books are closed promptly, ideally within ten working days of month end. Then the routine is short. Open the budget-vs-actual report, which most accounting software produces once the budget is loaded. Find the three largest differences. For each one, ask a single thing: is this timing or trend?
An insurance bill landing a month early is timing. Materials running 8% over for the third month in a row is a trend, and it means the prices or the supplier need attention.
Leave the original budget alone. When reality moves, keep a second forecast column and update that, so December shows both what was planned and what was learned.
Every budget will be wrong. Its job is to be wrong in a way that gets noticed by the 15th of the following month. The owner with a rough plan and current books will outrun the one with a beautiful spreadsheet and figures from the quarter before last. Small businesses have plenty of ambition. What they run short of is recent numbers.
This article is general information, not financial advice. What is right for your business depends on your circumstances. If you’d like help building a budget for 2027 book a call.
