The Budgeting Tool is a simple but powerful screen that helps you plan ahead, monitor profitability, and make better commercial decisions throughout the year.
It works in a spreadsheet-style format, allowing you to enter budgets for upcoming months and then replace those budgets with actual figures at the end of each month. Over time, this creates a clear picture of how your business is performing against plan.
Why the Budgeting Tool Matters
The more information you enter into the Budgeting Tool:
- The more your Virtual Assistant can help you throughout the year
- The more profitability KPIs become available to you
- The easier it is to understand where profit is being made—or lost
This tool is designed to support decision-making, not accounting.
Important:
The Budgeting Tool is used for estimates and planning. It is not intended to be 100% accurate or to replace your accounting system. It provides enough information to analyse profitability at a high level and guide smarter actions.
How This Screen Is Used in Practice
The Budgets screen is not just a forecast—it’s a decision-making tool.
It is used to:
- Set realistic revenue and profit targets
- Model different growth or cost scenarios
- Identify high-risk months in advance
- Support Review Meetings with your account manager
- Track whether actual performance aligns with expectations
When combined with KPI tracking and regular reviews, this screen helps ensure growth is planned, measured, and controlled, not left to chance.
How it Works
To view the budgeting tool:
Log into your Dashboard
Click on the BUDGETS link within AIVA
And then a screen similar to below will display.
The Budgets screen is where you plan, review, and evaluate the financial performance of your ecommerce business across the year. It brings revenue, costs, marketing spend, and profitability together in one place, month by month.
This screen is designed to help you answer three critical questions:
- What are we expecting to earn?
- What will it cost to achieve that revenue?
- Are we on track to hit our profit and margin goals?
Layout Overview
Across the top of the table, you’ll see the months of the year (January to December), followed by a Totals column on the far right.
Each row represents a key financial category, with monthly figures and automatic calculations that roll up into Year-To-Date (YTD) and annual totals.
At the top of the screen, you can:
- Save changes
- Cancel edits
- Expand All / Collapse All sections to show or hide detail
Revenue
When you open this section, you will see the following lines:
- Products Revenue - this is the revenue for all products excluding shipping fees and gift vouchers
- Shipping Fees - this is the revenue collected towards shipping fees
- Gift Vouchers - this is the revenue collected for gift vouchers - which is treated differently as it is a payment this month to be used for a future purchase
Important:
If your figures are not populating correctly (e.g. shipping fees are appearing as zero), contact the Help Desk and they will update your configuration.For gift vouchers calculation, we check if the parent product has the words "Gift Voucher" in the title. A more accurate approach is to configure this to use actual parent product codes for the gift vouchers - to do this, send the parent product codes to the Help Desk.
If a product does not have a COST PRICE, we estimate using 50% of the price displayed on the website. We can change this default rate for you.
If a product does not have a VAT RATE, we estimate using 23% of the price displayed on the website. We can change this default rate for you.
This section shows your actual/planned revenue per month. You can enter values for each month at the start of the year and each time you open the screen, it will automatically load the revenues for all the previous months:
Previous months auto-fill if set to zero - if you want the revenues to auto-fill again for a specific month, just reset it's Products cell to zero and click SAVE - when you re-enter the screen, it will auto-fill in the figures for that month
Current month uses an estimate after the 8th (based on 1 week of data) - which will refresh each day until the end of the month
When it auto-fills a cell, you will see a NOTES ICON beside the cell as in the screenshot below - hover over this to see the figures it used to calculate this cell
Each monthly value represents your expected revenue for that month
The YTD figure on the right shows how much revenue is planned (or achieved) so far this year
The Totals column shows expected annual revenue
Revenue Adjustments & Direct Costs
This section represents costs directly tied to revenue, such as:
- Cost of goods sold
- VAT
Tracking these separately allows you to understand gross performance before marketing and operating expenses are applied.
These fields work similarly to the above Revenue fields - they are auto-calculated for previous months and the current month.
Marketing Spend
This row shows how much you plan to spend on marketing each month, such as:
- Paid ads
- Campaign spend
- External marketing tools or services
- Agency Fees
These fields are never auto-populated so must be entered manually.
Because marketing spend directly influences traffic and revenue, it is critical for understanding efficiency and return.
The YTD Marketing Spend helps you quickly see how much has been invested so far.
Operating Costs
Operating costs are your fixed or semi-fixed business expenses, such as:
- Courier Fees
- Packaging Fees
- Returns & Refunds Handling
- Plugin Fees (e.g. Reviews)
- Payment Processing Fees (e.g. Stripe)
- Miscellaneous
These fields are never auto-populated so must be entered manually.
These costs usually remain relatively stable month to month and are essential for calculating true profitability.
Profit / Loss
The Profit / Loss row is calculated automatically.
It shows:
- Green values when the business is profitable
- Red values when the business is operating at a loss
This makes it immediately clear:
- Which months are expected to generate profit
- Which months may require attention, cost control, or revenue growth
The total at the far right shows overall profit for the year based on the current budget.
Net Margin %
Net Margin shows how much of your revenue remains as profit after all costs.
For example:
- A Net Margin of 15% means that 15% of revenue is retained as profit
This is one of the most important indicators of long-term sustainability and is closely monitored during reviews.
MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio)
MER (Revenue / Marketing Spend) measures how efficiently marketing spend is generating revenue.
Example:
- A MER of 21.0x means €21 in revenue for every €1 spent on marketing
This metric helps you:
- Judge marketing performance at a high level
- Identify when marketing is becoming inefficient
- Balance growth with profitability
How to Enter Values
Step 1: Enter Budgets at the Start of the Year
At the beginning of the year (or quarter), enter your budgeted values under each month. These represent what you expect to happen.
Step 2: Enter Actuals at Month End
At the end of each month, return to the Budgeting Tool and replace the budgeted numbers with the actual figures.
EXAMPLE: Entering Marketing Budgets
You can:
- Enter values manually, or
- Right-click on any cell to access productivity shortcuts:
Copy Across
Copies the value entered into that cell across all months in the same row.
For example, in this screen, you can enter 3,000 in for Google Ads and then right-click the box and click Copy Across and it will copy 3,000 across for all the cells to the right:
Distribute Total
Allows you to enter a total annual budget, which is then evenly distributed across all months.
In this example, if you clicked Distribute total, and then entered 36000 and clicked OK, it would spread 36000 evenly across all 12 months and enter 3000 in each month:
These options make it quick and easy to create realistic budgets without repetitive data entry.
If you need help setting up your budgets or understanding how to use this tool effectively, your Account Manager or the Help Desk will be happy to assist.
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