As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly create a marketing budget for your UK business.

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 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open your accounts, bank records, advertising platforms and sales system, then gather recent marketing spend, revenue, gross margin, leads, sales and payment timing by channel.
   2. Write down the planning period, revenue or lead target, cash limit, existing contracts, fixed marketing costs, one-off costs and the people or delivery capacity available to serve new customers.
   3. Paste the prompt into a chatbot and replace every bracketed slot with your figures, marking unknown items as unknown rather than estimating them.
   4. Export the response into a spreadsheet and compare each budget line with your invoices, subscriptions, advertising accounts and current price list.
   5. Recalculate the scenario totals and any cost-per-lead, cost-per-sale or return calculations in the spreadsheet, checking that VAT treatment and payment timing are consistent.
   6. Ask a colleague who understands your sales process to challenge the assumptions, then amend the approved figures and record which channels and spending limits you will monitor.
   7. Send the final budget to the person responsible for cash approval and set a regular review using actual spend and results against the budget.

   Prompt

   Create a practical marketing budget for my UK business using the information below. Do not invent figures, benchmarks, conversion rates or business facts. If an input is missing, label it as missing and show how the result changes if it is supplied.
   
   Business type: [business type]
   Products or services: [products or services]
   Planning period: [period]
   Revenue target: [target and currency]
   Gross margin or contribution margin: [figure, or unknown]
   Available cash for marketing: [figure, or unknown]
   Previous marketing spend: [figures by period and channel, or unknown]
   Previous results: [leads, sales, revenue, cost per lead or other measures, or unknown]
   Current customers and target customers: [description]
   Sales process and capacity: [description]
   Channels being considered: [list]
   Existing fixed marketing costs: [figures]
   One-off campaign costs: [figures]
   VAT treatment: [whether figures are VAT-inclusive or VAT-exclusive, or unknown]
   Constraints and risks: [details]
   
   Produce:
   1. A budget table by period, channel and cost type.
   2. A clear distinction between fixed costs, variable costs and one-off costs.
   3. A conservative, base and ambitious scenario, using only figures I supplied and clearly labelled assumptions.
   4. The calculations linking spend to the stated target, without claiming that spend guarantees sales.
   5. A cash-flow view showing when money would be committed or paid, if the timing information supports it.
   6. The decisions I still need to make, the data that would improve the budget and the main risks.
   7. A list of every assumption so I can check it.
   
   Keep the plan suitable for a UK business. Do not give tax, accounting or legal advice. Do not recommend a channel solely because it is popular. End with a short checklist of figures and decisions I must verify before approving the budget.

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