Marketing budget template:annual and monthly, by channel, in INR and USD.

Most budget spreadsheets stop at a list of channels and an annual number. That is enough to get a total approved and not enough to run the year. The questions finance asks in month four are different: what is already committed, what can still be paused, which lines are running ahead of plan, and what the extra spend in a festive quarter is buying. A marketing budget template built for those questions saves the scramble.

For context on size, Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey of 402 marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe found budgets flat at 7.7% of company revenue, with 59% of CMOs saying they lacked enough budget to execute their strategy and paid media taking 30.6% of the budget, or 2.4% of company revenue (Gartner, via Silicon UK). Campaign Asia's coverage adds that half of CMOs reported budgets of 6% or less (Campaign Asia). Most respondents had revenue above $1 billion, so treat these as context for large companies, not a target for a startup; the startup marketing spend guide and the marketing budget planner cover sizing for smaller businesses.

The annual sheet puts every line on one row with twelve monthly cells, then calculates the year total, the US dollar equivalent from the planning rate in cell B2, cash including GST for ad platform lines from the rate in B3, and each line's share. A summary block totals each category and the fixed and variable lines with SUMIF, and a check cell confirms the categories add up to the total. The tracker lists every line for every month in long format, which makes it easy to filter by month or pivot by channel. CSV files are saved in UTF-8 with a byte order mark, which Microsoft says lets Excel open them normally (Microsoft Support), and Google Sheets imports .csv through File, then Import (Google Docs Editors Help).

Split paid media by platform, not by objective, because invoices, GST and spending limits come per platform. Keep tool subscriptions out of the paid media lines even when they are marketing tools, so a cut to media does not accidentally cancel the CRM. For B2B companies the paid media mix is a decision in its own right: the Meta vs Google budget allocation guide and the cross-channel ad spend allocator help set the split, and the LinkedIn Ads cost in India page gives the platform's own numbers. The software lines often hide the biggest surprise; the HubSpot price in India and Zoho One price in India pages break licence costs down in rupees.

The split between brand and performance spend is a separate question from the channel layout. If that is the debate in your company, model it with the brand vs performance budget allocator before filling the sheet. Research from the LinkedIn B2B Institute, written up in Marketing Week, argues that 95% of the B2B buyers you reach are out of market and will not buy for months or years (Marketing Week), which is one reason a budget made entirely of capture spend tends to plateau.

The fixed share is the number a CFO will look at first, because it is the part of the budget that cannot respond to a bad quarter. A budget where most money is fixed has little room to reallocate toward what works; a budget that is almost all variable usually means the team is under-invested in the tools and people that make the spend work. The template shows the fixed share in the builder and in the summary block. When asked for a cut, show which variable lines go first and what pipeline they were producing: the marketing budget approval guide describes that framing, and what marketing to cut when runway is short covers the order.

The sources for the table are the platforms' own pages: Google's payments help on GST (Google Payments Centre Help), LinkedIn's India GST FAQ (LinkedIn Help) and Meta's 2018 announcement of local billing in India (Meta). Whether the GST is a real cost depends on whether your business can claim the input tax credit, so the template keeps it in a separate cash column rather than inflating the budget.

For US dollar reporting, use one planning rate for the year, set by finance, and keep it in a single cell so the whole sheet recalculates when it changes. The Reserve Bank of India publishes reference rates you can base it on (RBI reference rate archive); the template's default rate is a placeholder, not a quote. One platform behaviour matters for monthly tracking: Google Ads can spend up to twice the average daily budget on a given day, but no more than 30.4 times the average daily budget in a month (Google Ads Help), so a month's Google line should be set as daily budget × 30.4, not × 30.

The memo's assumptions section is what makes approval faster: revenue target, the pipeline or orders needed, target cost per result and the payback the business can afford. Those numbers come from the reverse funnel in how to set marketing pipeline targets and the unit economics in the CAC payback period matrix. The quarterly review where the budget is checked against results is laid out in the QBR template, and individual campaigns draw their budgets from these lines through the campaign brief template.

A marketing budget tracker is only useful if it is read next to results. Spend on its own says nothing about whether a line should continue; the same variance can be a problem on a channel that produces nothing and good news on one that produces at a low cost. In the PropTech CAC payback case study, two ad sets representing ₹7.4L a month were cut after offline conversion data showed no closed transactions over four months, and CAC fell from ₹12,000 to ₹4,200 within 90 days of the feedback loop going live. The tracker's job is to make that kind of decision visible every month instead of once a year. Wasted spend on paid media can be estimated with the ad spend waste calculator, and the reporting that connects spend to pipeline is covered in fully loaded CAC.