As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly build a business budget spreadsheet.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open a spreadsheet application and create a new blank workbook, then gather your bank statements, accounting reports, sales records, payroll totals, supplier commitments and planned purchases for the budget period.
   2. Remove customer and employee personal data, then paste the historic income and cost figures into a separate source sheet or attach the file to the chatbot.
   3. Fill in the bracketed sections in the prompt with your business type, budget period, opening cash, expected sales, known costs, VAT status and minimum cash reserve, using blank or unknown where you do not have a reliable figure.
   4. Paste the completed prompt into a chatbot that can create spreadsheet files and ask it to return the editable workbook, formulas, unresolved assumptions and checks sheet described in the prompt.
   5. Open the generated workbook and compare every input against the source records, then inspect the formulas for monthly totals, closing cash, scenario links and the minimum-reserve warning.
   6. Reconcile the profit and loss budget to the income and cost schedules, test the lower-sales and higher-cost scenarios with your own plausible assumptions, and send the completed workbook to an accountant for any VAT, tax or accounting treatment that you cannot verify.

   Prompt

   Build a UK business budget spreadsheet from the information below.
   
   Business type: [business type]
   Budget period: [start date] to [end date]
   Currency: GBP
   Historic income and costs: [paste figures or attach a spreadsheet]
   Expected sales by month: [paste figures or state that they are unavailable]
   Known fixed costs: [paste costs and payment frequency]
   Known variable costs: [paste costs and how they vary with sales]
   Payroll and contractor costs: [paste figures, excluding personal data]
   VAT status and VAT assumptions: [state what is known, or mark as unknown]
   Planned one-off spending: [paste items and dates]
   Opening cash balance: [figure]
   Minimum cash reserve: [figure]
   
   Create an editable workbook with these sheets:
   1. Instructions and assumptions
   2. Monthly income budget
   3. Monthly operating costs
   4. Payroll and contractors
   5. Cash budget
   6. Profit and loss budget
   7. Scenarios
   8. Checks and notes
   
   Use one column per month. Keep historic figures, user inputs, calculated figures and assumptions clearly distinct. Use formulas rather than hard-coded calculated totals. Include monthly and period totals, opening cash, cash movements, closing cash and a warning when closing cash falls below the minimum reserve. Create base, lower-sales and higher-cost scenarios, but do not invent figures. If a required figure is missing, leave the input blank, mark the assumption as unresolved and list the exact information needed.
   
   Use UK terms and GBP formatting. Do not give tax, VAT or accounting treatment as certain when the supplied information is incomplete. Flag any item that needs checking with an accountant. Add a checks sheet that tests whether totals reconcile, cash movements calculate correctly, formulas are present in each month and scenario outputs link to the assumptions. Explain the workbook structure and every unresolved assumption after creating it. Do not invent business facts, figures, rates or dates.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.