Retail Budget Template

Once the categories are set, enter your projected revenue and expenses for the current month. If this is your first budget, pull last month's bank statements and POS sales report to create a baseline. Don't worry about precision on the first pass — a rough plan you'll actually update beats a detailed plan you abandon. Copy the structure forward for remaining months, adjusting for your known seasonal patterns: bump Q4 revenue and COGS for holiday inventory, lower January projections to reflect the post-holiday slowdown.

A proper retail budget separates the costs that scale with sales from the ones that don't. COGS is your biggest variable cost — it should move as a consistent percentage of revenue (gross margins for retail typically run 40–60%, depending on the product category). Labor in retail is semi-variable: a baseline of full-time staff is fixed, but seasonal and part-time hours flex with traffic. Occupancy costs — rent, utilities, insurance — are fixed and non-negotiable, which means they eat a larger share of revenue in slow months. Tracking these three cost buckets separately tells you whether a bad month was a revenue problem, a COGS problem, or an overhead problem — and the fix is different for each.