Home Daycare Budget
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You may be feeling overwhelmed about how to do a home daycare budget, but if you break it down into easy steps, it’s not as hard as you think. It’s part of running a home daycare and being successful.
Home daycare comes with a ton of expenses. So keeping them in check in your home daycare budget is the most efficient way to make a profit in this business. If you want a printable business plan to see if you can even make money doing this, or need more advice on how to start a home daycare, check out these links. And most important, 5 things to include in your daycare payment policies.
You’re going to have food, household supplies, arts and craft materials, toys, equipment, licensing requirements, and many more things to pay for with the money you make.
If you’ve been doing daycare for a while, you may need help in reining in some of your expenses for home daycare so you can turn more profit each year. Keeping track of them regularly will help you see where you are bleeding money and where you could tighten the belt.
Home daycare expense spreadsheet
A bullet journal budget is a great place to track expenses. There are tons of great choices for ones you can use, but this bullet journal budget form is the one I’ve been using and it’s working great for me.
There are easy to use columns to record all of my expenses and income and compare where I’m spending too much from week to week. It’s customizable so you print it once and use it as many months as you’d like. It also organizes those expenses so you can look back at tax time and find the total for each expense category on your Schedule C. For more ideas to prepare for tax time, check out this post.
There are many other expense report templates you can print out to use. You can find some good ones here: Daycare worksheet, report templates, and free expense report templates.
Whether you do your home daycare budget expense tracking on paper or computer, setting up a spreadsheet is the best plan. You can use graph paper or lined notebook paper to set up columns if you like to make your expense spreadsheet with paper and pencil. Or using google docs or excel is a great way to make one on the computer.
I have always used excel and love that it adds up all the numbers for you so you don’t have to worry about the time it takes to add up a column or math errors that can happen. I don’t know much about google docs. I’m not really computer savvy and learned how to use excel in high school. I also used it a lot at work before I had a home daycare, so it was a natural fit for my daycare business records.
Printable expense tracker
Click on the pdf highlighted above to use the free printable expense tracker that I use. You are welcome to make it your own. It’s a great place to start when thinking about getting things in order for taxes. But even more important than being ready for tax time is budgeting. You need to think about whether you are spending more on your home daycare business than you are making.
Or are you spending all the profits? It’s really easy to do because everything involved in caring for children is so expensive. I bring in a good amount of money in a year, but just food for the kids is around $7,000 on average. This year, with the virus going around, it will be a lot more because food has been incredibly marked up. Not to mention the expenses for all the extra supplies I need right now.
Tracking business expenses in childcare
If you track expenses carefully each month, you can see where you are overspending and places you could cut back so you can keep some profits to help your family. I mean, we work for a living, not for just loving right?
My hope is that these tools can help you make a better living in your business by tracking the expenses and making good decisions with what you make.
Can you use paper towel tubes and donated crayons for art time instead of buying premade kits? Can you make playdough out of something inexpensive you have around the house instead of buying name brand? There are lots of ways to cut expenses once you see where must of your loss is going.
Providing care in your home for children is a wonderful job. I love what I do and can’t imagine doing anything else. But I do need to make a living while I do and so do you. Remember, enjoying hugs and singing with kids is totally free too! And those are some of the best activities of all.
Here are more resources for free daycare forms that can help you run your home daycare business too.
