Services • Financial Budgeting
Plan it. Track it. Trust it. All year long.
You bring the financial expertise. I bring the Excel engineering. I build budgeting systems that scale across every department, property, or project you manage — structured, automated, and built to hold up under real scrutiny.
Budget season means the same scramble every year: chasing down last year’s numbers, rebuilding formulas that broke, trying to remember who changed what.
And once it’s built, tracking actuals against it all year means another round of manual updates, another set of numbers to reconcile by hand — every single month.
The bottom line: Budget season shouldn’t be a season.
Structured
Every department, property, or project follows the same layout, so every budget reads the same way.
Automated
A new budget builds itself: input sheets created, prior data imported, and starting figures calculated.
Tailored
Income and expenses separate or combined, one workbook or many. The structure fits your organization, not the other way around.
How I Build It
What data is needed?
Primary Data
Your Budget Categories
All the breakouts and groupings that define your data:
- Department, property, or project groupings
- GL codes and line items
- Monthly budget and actual figures
- Fees, transfers, closings, and other special-cased items
Structure
Multi-Year, Multi-Category
GL line items are grouped together by sub-category for easy entry.
- One Table per sub-category
- Editable lists of GL codes
- Monthly entry across one or two years
- Automatic row and column totals
Metadata Lists
Rules That Keep It Consistent
Default values to guide your budgeting and assorted values that connect various datasets.
- Growth rates and calculation basis
- GL categorization rules
- Validation to protect data integrity
- Data mapping lookups
Where does it come from?
Structure
One Template, Endless Copies
A single empty template clones itself, imports all available raw data, and automatically builds a series of input sheets categorized and tailored to the new project.
Prime your new budget with calculated figures or automatically copy in data from a prior version of the template.
Primary Data
Guided, Locked-Down Entry
Users create their new budget on separate input sheets in intuitive, Excel-guided Tables.
The entire process is sandboxed, with password-protected sheets, locked formula columns, strict data validation, and VBA events keeping every interaction inside the guardrails.
Consolidated Database
All Inputs, Rolled Into One
Combining a VBA UDF, recursive Lambdas, and Power Query, I roll the data from every input page into a centralized Excel “database.”
This central database is built automatically and acts as the source for every report, graphic, and output.
What do you need to do with it?
Standard Reports
Annual & Comparative Reports
Annual reports, P&L statements, and budget-vs-actual comparisons, built automatically from the rolled-up data.
These reports automatically adapt to your GLs and categories. No inserting or deleting rows or manually messing with formatting.
Specialized Output
Pivot Tables, Custom Reports, and Exports
Lambda-built reports applied to any similarly structured dataset mean new views can be quickly and easily created.
Pivot tables, exports of the new budget, and automatically-emailed overviews are all tailored to your needs.
Auditing Tools
Built-In Oversight
Conditional formatting flags manual changes, duplicate GLs, and anything in need of reconciliation, all before the budget is finalized.
Custom alerts can be added to protect users against potential issues.
Ideal for
Finance and operations teams managing budgets across multiple departments, properties, or projects, who need a structured, auditable system that scales automatically, not another spreadsheet only one person understands.
FAQs
Do you have an FP&A background?
No. But I have a deep understanding of effective formula construction in Excel. If you tell me what you need, I can make Excel generate that output. My background working for a database-driven money management firm gives me a good foundation with financial concepts.
How does this scale across multiple properties or departments?
I take your hierarchy and build it into Excel in a way that makes sense for your team.
For instance, you may enter income and expenses separately. Each page will be a category of revenue (or expenditures). Each Table will be a sub-category, and each Table row a GL.
Or, you may combine income and expenses within a budgetary grouping. There would be separate revenue Tables and expenditure Tables, with those Tables cloned for each sub-grouping within your budget group. Again, each row in each Table will represent a single GL.
If required, I can build a multi-workbook structure. For that, I would roll up the data from multiple files into a master workbook for consolidated reporting.
Whatever makes the most sense for your corporate structure, I can build within my Excel framework.
Do you also build P&L or financial statement reports?
Yes. I will import your income and expense line items from files you export — or directly from your database — and use that as the basis for your financial statements. I'll work with you to build the metadata tables required to convert your raw data into summarized, actionable reports.