Budgeting is critical for businesses, as it helps estimate how much you can earn from every unit of money spent. It estimates income and expenses over a specific time.
Organizations compare their budget with the actual income and expenditure at the end of the given period to plan for subsequent periods.
Given today’s complex and dynamic business environment, you need the right business budgeting software to estimate your company’s income and expenditure. Due to this growing importance, the budgeting software industry is projected to be worth $47.97 billion by 2031, showing a CAGR of 11.4% from 2022.
Read on and learn about the importance of business budgeting software and how you can choose the appropriate one for your organization.
Why Do You Need a Business Budget Software?
A business budget software provides the following benefits:
- Make Resources Available
The fundamental goal of budgeting is to ensure that sufficient resources are available to complete a project or task. Knowing how much money you have for a task can help pay for the resources accordingly.
- Prioritize Goals
When you have multiple initiatives and goals, knowing how many resources to allocate for each can be conflicting. Budget management software provides accurate income and expenditure estimates so you can prioritize the tasks and allocate appropriate resources.
- Plan Operations
Setting reasonable financial goals at the beginning of the year is necessary for planning the year’s operations. For example, if you have additional money, you can hire more people for new projects, invest in the required tools, look for more opportunities, and expand your offerings.
To help set the goals and plan your operations, you need budgeting software that offers accurate information about your business operations.
- Leverage Your Financial Data
A budgeting and planning software helps make sense of your financial data. Knowing your income and expenditure patterns can improve planning. Also, you can understand where you’re overspending and how to spend your money better.
Now that you know the benefits of business budgeting software for your organization, let’s look at some top tools in this space. Knowing each tool and its features can help you make an informed decision.
Intuit QuickBooks – Best All-in-One Business Budgeting Tool
Intuit QuickBooks is a comprehensive financial tool for record-keeping and reporting. You can record every expense in detail and even add receipts and memos for tracking.
Also, you can split the costs into multiple categories for better accounting processes. Its advanced reporting capabilities are another plus, as you can see your financials in charts and graphs for better planning.
Key Features
- Comes with automatic reconciliation processes
- Highly scalable
- Helps organizations meet regulatory compliance
- Offers a customizable dashboard and reporting
- Integrates with more than 750 apps
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Comprehensive recording of expenses | May involve a learning curve |
| Comes with more than 50 templates in the entry plan | Expensive |
| Easy to share information and collaborate | |
| Live support |
Pricing
QuickBooks offers four pricing plans:
- Simple start – $30 per month
- Essentials – $60 per month
- Plus – $90 per month
- Advanced – $200 per month
QuickBooks is a convenient tool for recording expenses and planning budgets. However, it can be expensive.
Zoho Books – Best Value for Money
Zoho Books is a popular business budgeting software. It is particularly well-suited for businesses that use other Zoho products. A highlight of this tool is its extensive configuration options. You can work with the app’s settings to toggle the required features.
Also, you can import existing data into your application, including your contacts, item records, and transactions. Not many tools in this space offer this level of customization.
Key Features
- Displays all transactions in a single place
- Allows you to upload receipts against each expense to stay better organized
- Generates bills to track what you owe
- Creates an audit trail for easy tracking
- Build reports using real-time data to optimize your business
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Highly flexible | May be too complex for small businesses |
| Easy to manage different types of transactions | Fewer integrations |
| Simple and clean user interface | |
| Customizable reports |
Pricing
Zoho Books offers six pricing plans:
- Free version
- Standard – $15 per month
- Professional – $40 per month
- Premium – $60 per month
- Elite – $120 per month
- Ultimate – $240 per month
Zoho Books has many features that you can access through a clean and intuitive interface. Plus, its many pricing tiers make it a good value for all businesses.
Centage – Best for Detailed Analysis
Centage is a SaaS budgeting software that offers in-depth analysis and insights into your budgets. This cloud-native platform provides granular control over every transaction while being flexible and scalable to meet your growing business.
It is ideal for all businesses, especially medium to large companies needing more control and visibility into their budgets.
Key Features
- Builds a budget model based on your needs
- Tests multiple scenarios and generates reports to improve the efficiency of your budgeting
- Generates accurate forecasts and converts them into visually appealing reports
- Uses built-in accounting rules and business logic to improve financial accuracy
- Supports role-based access
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Powerful features like models and automation | No transparency in pricing |
| Intuitive interface | A possible learning curve for some employees |
| Excellent customer service | |
| Plenty of training and resources |
Pricing
Centage offers three pricing plans:
- Standard: $950 per month
- Professional: $1,950 per month
- Enterprise: Custom quote
You can book a demo to try out Centage.
Centage provides a detailed analysis of your income and expenses to improve your financial efficiency. Its automation capabilities also save time and effort, making your employees more productive.
Scoro – Best Centralized Budgeting Software for Business
Scoro is a comprehensive platform that includes CRM and project management, besides budgeting, to help manage your entire organization through a single tool.
You can also use this tool to seamlessly set budgets, track expenses, and manage your project’s status and the cost incurred. Its financial dashboard also enhances your visibility.
Key Features
- Provides complete visibility into resource utilization and profitability
- Detects unprofitable clients and activities and prioritizes growth
- Generates meaningful reports for better planning
- Balances workloads and keeps employees productive
- Automates invoicing and payment collection
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Comprehensive and easy to use | Limited flexibility with configuration options |
| Affordable | Customer support can be better |
| Supports sharing and collaboration | |
| Integrates with popular tools like Google Calendar |
Pricing
Scoro offers four plans:
- Essential – $26 per month
- Standard – $37 per month
- Pro – $63 per month
- Ultimate – Custom price
You can book a demo and try this tool for free for a limited time.
Scoro is a complete work management software that can manage your budget, track projects, boost employee productivity, and more. Its intuitive interface ensures you have all the information you need in a single place.
Oracle PBCS – Best for Collaboration
Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Services (PBCS) is another SaaS budgeting software that allows you to forecast and track expenses without deploying any hardware.
A salient aspect of this tool is its web interface through which a distributed workforce can collaborate to budget and monitor expenses in your organization. It also offers the option to plan capital assets and workforce performance.
Key Features
- Imports metadata from Microsoft Word for creating smart views
- Supports a hierarchical planning structure to ensure all departments are on board during budgeting
- Integrates well with other Oracle products
- Uses Hyperion for generating financial reports
- Offers rules management options for quick tracking
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Customizable dashboard | Can be complex |
| Easy to deploy for any business | No smart view for non-Microsoft Office products |
| A well-developed web interface for easy collaboration | |
| Role-based access |
Pricing
Oracle PBCS costs $120 per user per month. You can request a live demo.
PBCS is a good choice for all businesses, especially large ones that have to budget and track expenses across multiple departments. Its web interface helps a distributed workforce to access this tool from anywhere.
Datarails – Best for Small Businesses
Datarails is a business budgeting software that automates financial planning and reporting. This tool keeps all your financial data in a single place for easy understanding and retrieval.
It also helps visualize data on a dashboard and supports predictive analysis. Datarails is a good choice for small businesses that currently use spreadsheets for tracking.
Key Features
- Automates data collection and brings them to a single platform
- Helps the business to easily plan costs and revenues
- Displays data on graphs and charts for easy understanding
- Allows you to make informed decisions
- Models multiple scenarios to understand the impact of change on your financials
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Out-of-the-box templates for different businesses | Resource-intensive |
| Eases compliance processes for small businesses | May require custom formulas |
| Intuitive dashboards | |
| Role-based access |
Pricing
Datarails provide a custom quote based on your requirements. You can also request a demo.
Datarails is a platform designed for small businesses that use spreadsheets to manage their expenses. It integrates with popular ERPs and CRMs to bring all the data to a single place for more efficient processing and greater visibility.
Prophix – Best for Scalability
Prophix is a financial management platform that helps you create budgets and track them accurately. It acts as a single place for all your spreadsheets and data for better planning and analysis.
Moreover, it also quickly builds financial models to understand business outcomes across multiple scenarios.
Key Features
- Offers centralized security for all your data
- Simplifies data collection, analysis, and consolidation for better planning and coordination
- Flexible and scalable planning models to meet your organization’s needs
- Comes with a feature-rich web interface
- Reduces manual errors associated with manual spreadsheets.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Comes with budget planning templates | Graphs and charts are limited |
| Tracks all changes in an audit trail | Dashboards can be better. |
| Automation capabilities save time | |
| Provides an integrated financial planning workflow |
Pricing
Reach out to its partner network to inquire.
Prophix is a highly flexible tool that can be configured for any business or scenario. Also, its extensive reporting templates and their easy customization make it a good value for money.
LivePlan – Best for Startups
LivePlan is a budget software for businesses and entrepreneurs with a non-financial background. It is simple to use and has a barebones style to help startups and small businesses create a financial budget that aligns with their needs.
It even has an automation feature that provides prompts and creates an appropriate budget based on your data and business goals.
Key Features
- No prior technical or financial experience is necessary to use this tool.
- Comes with more than 550 sample plans spanning across all industries
- Can accurately forecast the most common situations
- Creates reports with relevant information for different stakeholders
- Integrates well with QuickBooks and Xero
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| AI-powered assistant | Customization requires a high learning curve |
| Customizable features | Limited integrations |
| Excellent customer support and online resources | |
| Provides an integrated financial planning workflow |
Pricing
LivePlan offers two pricing plans:
- Standard – $20 per month
- Premium – $20 for the first month and $40 from the second month onwards.
Create an account to get started.
Planguru – Best for Forecasting
Planguru is an affordable business budgeting software for small businesses and nonprofits. It gathers information for the last 10 years, analyzes them, and creates a budget accordingly.
You can customize the coverage to meet your current needs. Its reports and dashboards are comprehensive and provide the insights you need.
Key Features
- Sets financial goals and tracks the results for accountability
- Creates intelligent scenarios for your business and provides insights on how you can navigate them
- Imports historical analysis
- Comes with a pre-built integrated financial statement structure
- Has an online dashboard, scorecard, and advanced reporting tools
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Imports data from Excel | Limited formulas |
| Support 20+ forecasting methods | May involve a steep learning curve. |
| Advanced reporting tools | |
| Create graphs and charts when needed |
Pricing
Planguru offers two pricing plans:
- Single entity – $83 per month
- Multi-department consolidations: $250 per month
You can try Planguru free for a limited time.
Planguru is ideal for accurate forecasting as it analyzes up to 10 years of data and uses 20+ forecasting methods. It offers trends, averages, and growth rates to help you better understand your business state and plan accordingly.
Anaplan – Best for Large Datasets
Anaplan is a financial planning tool for analyzing large datasets and interpreting patterns for improved financial planning and budgeting. It is ideal for large organizations generating lots of data from its sales, operations, human resources, and finance departments.
Anaplan brings data from these departments and consolidates them to provide insights and generate budgets to optimize your operations as a whole.
Key Features
- Connects your entire enterprise through a single platform.
- Has a scalable and intelligent architecture.
- Provides a single source of truth for informed budgeting.
- Contextualizes data to help prepare for the future.
- Makes collaboration easy among your departments.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Security features like role-based access control, data encryption at rest, and more. | Reporting can be better |
| Scale well with your business | Requires in-depth training |
| Create granular insights | |
| Advanced charts and graphs |
Pricing
You have to contact the support team for a custom quote.
Anaplan is a good choice when you have to analyze large datasets to project future scenarios and budget accordingly.
Comparison of Business Budgeting Software
| Tool | Starting Pricing | Free Plan/Trial | Best-suited for |
|---|---|---|---|
| QuickBooks | $30 | No | All organizations |
| Zoho Books | $0 | Yes | SMBs |
| Centage | $950 | No | Growing businesses |
| Scoro | $26 | Yes | All organizations |
| Oracle PBCS | $120 | No | Large businesses |
| Datarails | Custom | No | SMBs |
| Prophix | Custom | No | All organizations |
| LivePlan | $20 | No | Startups and entrepreneurs with a non-financial background |
| Planguru | $83 | Yes | SMBs and nonprofits |
| Anaplan | Custom quote | No | Multi-department organizations |
Choosing the Best Budgeting and Planning Software
Choosing the best budgeting and planning software is necessary for financial planning and tracking. In this article, we looked at 10 tools that cater to diverse needs, and your selection must align with your organization’s size and requirements.
First, assess your organization’s needs and look into the features of each tool so you can pick the one that best meets your goals and budget.
