As a business owner, you already know how critical it is to keep track of your financial records. This process involves accurately recording your income and expenses, creating financial reports to make informed business decisions, and paying attention to money flow. One of the easiest ways to do this is with various accounting spreadsheets.
These electronic files aren’t just cost-effective: They also don’t require a steep learning curve. Since they’re versatile and customizable, you and your employees should have an easy time using them for your business.
In this article, we explore the ins and outs of templates for bookkeeping, and provide six accounting templates for free download!
Table of Contents
What Is an Accounting Spreadsheet Template?
The essence of accounting is to provide you with a snapshot of all financial aspects related to your business. To achieve this, account sheet templates offer an excellent starting point.
These pre-designed sheets come equipped with formulas, tables, and formats that simplify the organization of your financial transactions. Accounting spreadsheets typically have a range of different tabs tailored to record your assets, liabilities, cash flow, income, and expenses. Some templates for accountants are even built to mirror financial reporting documents required for tax filings.
Instead of building your spreadsheets from scratch, you can access a pre-built spreadsheet and begin tracking your finances immediately. You can also continuously customize it to fit your specific needs later.
Different Types of Accounting Spreadsheets
There are as many types of accounting templates as there are financial aspects of your business. For example, you might need an invoice tracker to ensure all your clients have paid their dues. An income statement template is also essential for understanding your financial health.
With such many money-related records to keep track of, we’ve prepared six core types of accounting spreadsheets to consider.
1. Profit and Loss Templates
In any business, a profit and loss (P&L) statement shouldn’t be overlooked. These factors are derived from the total revenue of a certain company, its total costs, and other inflows and outflows of its finances.
One way to gather all of them into one place is via a profit and loss statement (also known as an income statement) template. These typically contain separate fields to input data like total revenue, expenses, net income, and much more.
Ultimately, a P&L template provides an easy summary of a business’s finances by showcasing its capability of generating profits, managing expenses, and achieving target sales.
Our profit and loss statement spreadsheet comes equipped with four distinct categories: income information, costs of goods sold, operating expenses, and add-backs. We’ve also included metrics like gross profit and net profit that automatically display results based on your data.
2. Invoice Tracking Templates
Invoices serve as records of your sales. Not only do they detail the enterprises your business has dealings with, but they also showcase the related products or services, amounts involved, and other information (like payment dues and financial channels).
Keeping track of your invoices helps ensure that your business receives full compensation from its customers. Since your income is one of its core components, this is also crucial in your P&L statement.
An accounting spreadsheet that’s tailored to track your invoices comes in handy in this regard. Our template version records the names and contact details of your clients, their payment deadlines, outstanding balances, and transaction statuses.
Our invoice tracking spreadsheet also lets you keep your invoices in a centralized document that’s easy to navigate (thanks to dropdown lists and features). It comes with functions that automatically add the outstanding amounts of your customer, depending on their payment status.
Another feature that you might find handy is the aging metric, which would count how many days or months a certain payment has been past due.
3. Business Budget Spreadsheets
Having a good grasp of your money is essential if you want to ensure that all parts of your business get properly funded. And no, mental calculations and arbitrary estimates won’t suffice. You’ll want to lay out all the necessary expenses to keep your company running.
Budgeting allows you to forecast your income and expenses, which is handy when setting your business goals. Other benefits include controlled spending, apt funds allocation, and good decision-making. Moreover, you can also consider aspects which you can cut costs from.
A business budget spreadsheet assists in financial planning. Typically, it includes categories for your total income and a detailed breakdown of your business expenses, fixed and variable costs, and goals.
A comparison to your actual finances is also crucial, as this lets you adjust your budget allocation at more accurate levels. For example, you can just allocate $500 on a certain expense (instead of $1000) by knowing the real costs. Getting the differences between the forecasted and actual amounts also lets you gauge your available funds.
Money allocation usually requires a customized spreadsheet to determine specific costs. To make one, check out our guide on how to create a budget spreadsheet for your business.
Our free business budget template also provides a snapshot of your finances at the top, and succeeding tables offer a breakdown of your income sources and expenses.
4. Payroll Templates
As a business owner, you already know that employee payroll is one of the biggest expenses. While you want to ensure your workers are fairly compensated, it’s important not to pay out more than necessary.
To meet both conditions, a payroll tracking template usually contains separate fields for an employee’s payment scheme (either an hourly wage or annual salary), the total amount of work done, taxes and deductions, and net income.
This helps business owners understand how much money is spent on salaries, plan payroll expenses in advance, and ensure that their enterprise has enough cash flow to meet payroll obligations. These data might also be needed in income statements, particularly the total amount spent on wages.
Our free accounting template lets you record the basic details of your employee (e.g., pay period, name). We’ve also included separate calculators to automatically compute gross pay and net pay, depending on what’s entered under the “total hours” category and other relevant fields.
5. Balance Sheet Templates
One of the most important accounting reports, balance sheets provide business owners with a comprehensive picture of a business’s finances at a specific point in time. They usually include information about what you own, what’s owed, and what’s left over for the owners (also known as assets, liabilities, and equity).
Balance sheets are important instruments that showcase a business’s creditworthiness, especially regarding asset information. They’re also helpful when the time comes to file taxes.
Templates for balance sheets usually place your asset information side by side with the sum of your liabilities and equity. These are then divided into more specific categories (e.g. your current and fixed assets) and current/long-term liabilities. A sum for each category is provided, which you can use to determine if your finances are indeed “balanced.”
In addition to the side-by-side comparison, our balance sheet template also involves ratios that help determine whether finances are sound. An example of this is the debt ratio, which compares your liabilities to your assets. Investors look at this metric to know whether your company is worth their money.
6. Account Ledger Template
Ledgers are detailed records of all financial transactions that occur within your business, organized by account or category. In addition to tracking inflow and outflow, they record your accounts payable, loans, inventory costs, and more.
You might notice that ledgers are interrelated with the other templates we’ve discussed by far. The sums contained within can be used as a reference when you plan your finances, create your balance sheet, prepare your income statement, and more.
Ledger spreadsheets typically feature a date range, a starting amount, transaction dates, reference numbers, and transaction details. They can be categorized as a sales, purchase, or general-purpose ledger template.
You can use our free ledger template as a general version, which allows you to record your sales (as well as the expenses you’ve made during a specific period). We’ve included an “account type” column to sort your transactions. Moreover, formulas are also set to automatically calculate your credit, debit, and balance.
Why Use Our Accounting Templates?
We understand there’s no one-size-fits-all bookkeeping spreadsheet for a business’ finances. That’s why we provide multiple template types to be used for a wide range of purposes.
Our templates are primarily made for Google Sheets, meaning you can access them for free (as long as you have a verified Google account). We’ve also ensured intuitive use by providing some notes and easy-to-understand categories.
The spreadsheets we’ve provided also come equipped with formulas that help compute your business metrics — removing the need for you to do tedious calculations. You should be able to drag and drop your financial data and wait for the results to be displayed.
Final Thoughts
Maintaining accurate financial records is crucial for the success of any business. And you can achieve this by using our free accounting spreadsheets!
We have a collection of more advanced templates and spreadsheets that might be exactly what your business is missing. When you check out our Gumroad profile, get 50% off by using the code SSP.
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