Budgets are usually a direct result of a company's forecasting process. Financial planning teams set out the cash flow expectations for the coming quarter or year, with the amount of revenue and spending required to hit certain goals. To reliably reach those goals, you need a budget.

Unlike with personal finance, companies struggle to monitor the cash flow in and out of their bank accounts. Budgeting tools help streamline this process by presenting what's been spent in simple, accessible dashboards.

This keeps the company in line with forecasting by ensuring that those budgets are followed.

The best budgeting software gives you complete control over how you build your budgets and can be customized. But most often, team budgets are set out in familiar ways following certain patterns.

Your budgeting solution will set out a team structure in a template form, and you just need to fill in the specifics. For this reason, it's very user-friendly to get started, and very hard to make mistakes.

Businesses of all sizes can use budgeting software to help manage cash flow, collaborate better, and keep the company financially secure. Small businesses love that it helps their teams move quickly. More established businesses enjoy the extra visibility over spending, and the amount of time saved on juggling Excel sheets.

Budgets make good financial management easier, especially as part of a full spend management process. You have company cards, invoices, and expense claims all connected through one central platform. You'll see how each of these interacts with the team budgets set out during forecasting, in real time.

Specific financial data available in graphs and charts includes: actual company spend versus budgeted spend, highest-spending teams and individuals, the vendors receiving the most payments from your company, the number of outstanding subscription and invoice payments, and the number of payments missing receipts. This is all highly actionable information to make corporate performance and money management more effective.

Ease of use is critical to good business tools. If teams can't adopt them easily, they'll never become part of your corporate processes. And the best budgeting software is designed with this in mind. These tools should have simple functionality, great mobile apps (for iOS and Android), and workflows that are adaptive to your company structure.

For example, 98% of customers say that switching to Spendesk is easy. And they recommend its highly responsive customer support.

Well-known budgeting solutions include Mint, YNAB, and Quicken. These are great examples of personal finance software with excellent budgeting features.

For companies, we recommend using Spendesk Budgets as part of a simple but robust spend management system.