Department Expense Budget Calculator

First decide how many people and how many months the budget covers. Then split expenses into three groups: travel (travelling employees × travel days × accommodation and daily amount + transport), daily per-person costs (meals, local transport, phone) and shared team costs (hospitality, training, subscriptions). The sum of the three groups is the monthly budget; multiplied by the number of months, it is the period budget.

Not every employee travels, so the tool first asks for the share of employees who travel. For each traveller, you enter monthly travel days, nightly accommodation, daily meals or per diem, and transport costs such as tickets and fuel. Set the daily amounts according to the limits in your company's travel policy.

The tool adds the expected price increase you enter to the period total in one step. This is a simple approach: if prices rise month by month, the real total will be somewhat lower. Also review the limits you set in the past against current prices before preparing the budget.

Variance is actual minus budget; the variance percentage is that difference divided by the budget. A positive variance means the budget was exceeded; a negative variance means spend came in under budget. On its own it is neither good nor bad: an overrun may come from a price increase, an unplanned trip or expenses coded to the wrong category; staying under budget may point to deferred spend. Look first at categories where both the percentage and the amount are high, check the cause through the expense items, and update the next period's budget accordingly. You can download the comparison as a .csv file and keep it in Excel.

No. The default values are only examples that show how the tool works; they are not market averages or recommendations. Update them based on your company's past expense data and policy.

Yes, it is completely free and needs no sign-up. Everything is calculated in your browser; the amounts you enter are not sent to any server.

In Masraff's Budget module, you define and track budgets. With the Expense Policy Engine, you can also set category-based limits and warn on or block expenses that exceed them.