10 Best Excel Templates For Small Businesses

It’s exhausting just to type out.

A company called Simple Sheets has developed the largest bundle of Excel templates online designed for entrepreneurs, freelancers and small business owners. These templates empower you to run your business without expensive software, maximizing the most powerful (and most used) tool in the history of the computer: Microsoft Excel.

Here is what makes these template powerful.

Anybody can use these templates.

Every template comes with an instruction tab that shows the contents of the template, a 1–3 rating for customizing the template, an explanation of each sheet and how to customize the template.

Not only that but most templates come with a video that walks you how to use the template. Excel is a learned skill, not as easy to pick-up as PowerPoint or Word. With these Simple Sheets templates, you can immediately get value from Excel without having spent years mastering the software.

In this article, we’re going to dive into my 10 favorite Excel templates from Simple Sheets.

    1)    Invoicing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XF9BADFSV8&t

There’s fancy software to send invoices, but why add to your list of expenses? Automate invoicing by plugging in data that won’t change — company data, products, price of products, payment methods like PayPal and bank number — and then plug in client information.

I bet you can even save and send an invoice in 3 minutes.

    2)    Cap Table

A critical aspect of setting up your small business or startup is the cap table. A cap table shows how equity is split among founders and investors. I’m a bit bias, but this is my favorite template. It’s already filled with pre-populated data so all you need to do is plug in relevant information like names, common shares, preferred shares and valuation (if previously raised). It will make it easy to see potential dilution and included is a circle graph to see how each slice of the pie is divided.

    3)    Payroll Template

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcmIX3MxQrg&t

Making sure your employees get paid is kind of a big deal. To them anyway. Just kidding, I’m sure it is to you too otherwise business owner might not be the role for you.

The payroll template is one of the most useful for business owners. Simply add tax rates, wages and employee info one time to make the logic work for your enterprise. From there, plug in the hours worked and, just like that, you’ve done payroll.

Best part is the dashboard which gives you a high-level overview of other important stats like overtime hours, vacations hours, sick hours, total gross pay and total net pay.

    4)    Employee Scheduling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_XU-pJbnhw

If you’re using an employee schedule made from scratch or a clunky table alternative, forget about it *In my embarrassingly inaccurate New York accent*. Add your employee to a list, roles and ‘shifts’ and get to scheduling. This template is shockingly easy to navigate and will make scheduling simple for you and your employees.

    5)    Expense Report

This is Expense Report Heaven. It’s not just a sheet for filling out expense reports. It’s a comprehensive Excel template that makes it easy to see many reports at once as well as a Consolidation Pivot Table for you to filter Expense Reports by employee, expense, and timeframe.

    6)    Sales Forecasting

Just as a weatherman/weatherwoman will examine charts and maps to see what conditions are ahead, businesses benefit from having the same kind of foresight. The Sales Forecasting template makes it easy for you to track sales for different products over a period of time. You can edit or add products as necessary as well as edit pricing.

Simply fill in units sold, unit price and COGS and the logic will spit out calculated sales growth rate, revenue, margin per unit and gross profit. All these numbers will be automatically crunched and displayed in the dashboard which makes the data digestible.

    7)    Inventory Management

This fully automated template will kick your inventory management woes in the teeth.

It keeps track of inventory orders, pricing and when you need to re-order, as long as you update the template accordingly. Great for e-commerce businesses and retail shops.

    8)    Accounts Payable   and   9)    Accounts Receivable

We’re cheating here, listing both together, but that’s because accounting isn’t that fun for someone like me. Still, it’s an essential part of running a business. Of course you need to know who owes you money and who you owe money to. These templates are easy to use and a must-have for making sure you’re square with your business suppliers and customers.

    10)    Amortization Schedule

Debt is often inevitable (hi, student loans) so if you can’t avoid it entirely your next best bet is to manage it. The Amortization Schedule template makes it super simple to see your debt, whether it be for your work truck, infrastructure, commercial building or any other large purchase you put on credit.

I love this template as understanding your debt is a crucial part to getting out of it.

Want dozens of Excel templates? Solve any business problem with pre-built and highly customizable templates for every industry—ecommerce, retail, construction, sales and more.

Check out Simple Sheets entire package of Excel Templates and Courses here!