Very topical in recent times but nothing new. This is about making sure that when you work out the costs of an activity or project - either for a funding bid or as part of your organisation's budget process - you include all the costs. We should all know what it costs us to do the things we do, and who is paying for it.

We can all think of the staff salaries, but what about a share of the heating bill, or even a contribution to replacing the computers  in 5 years' time.

At CA plus we use many techniques to help us, here are three excel templates which you are free to download and use as you wish.

This full organisation template is designed to help you work out the budget for your whole organisation using FCR techniques. It allocates all your 'shared' or 'support' or 'overhead' costs in proportion to staff time.

The project template is designed to help you work out the budget for a specific 3 year project. It also uses staff time as the allocation method although you can change this as you wish. This template is designed for people who do not know excel, and are fairly new to budgeting.

The enterprise template is like the project template but it includes a whole section to work out your income from sales and fees for your enterprise.