Zero-Based Budgeting Template
Zero-based budgeting starts every cost line at zero and makes it earn its place, instead of taking last year and adding a few percent. The template puts last year beside the rebuilt figure so you can see exactly which categories were being carried along by habit.
Incremental budgeting preserves old decisions forever. A subscription bought for a project that ended in 2023, an agency retainer nobody has reviewed, a courier contract priced for twice your current volume — each survives because it was in last year's budget and the increase looked reasonable. Nothing in the process ever asks whether the line should exist at all.
The discipline is in the justification column, and it has to be written in terms of what the money buys: this covers X users, this is Y deliveries at Z per delivery. A line that can only be justified as "we have always had it" is the one the exercise is designed to find. Where a cost scales with something, record the driver next to the amount — that is what makes next year's version take an hour instead of a week.
Do not do this to every line. Zero-basing payroll and rent is theatre; they are contractual and you know what they cost. The return is in discretionary overheads — software, marketing, travel, professional services, logistics — which is usually a modest share of spend and almost all of the waste. Run it on the top twenty categories by value and you will have captured most of what there is to capture.
The exercise only works with clean actuals: twelve months of spend sorted by category, with the one-offs visible. Finmap categorises payments as they clear, so the starting figures are what you actually spent rather than what the old budget said you would.
