Top 5 Business Budgeting Software Reviewed for 2025

According to a U.S. Bank study, 82% of businesses fail because of poor cash flow management.

Business budgeting software can significantly streamline the process of managing your company’s finances, and give you more reliable financial data. Here’s a list of the top solutions available today.

Business budgeting software helps businesses process large amounts of complex data by automating the project financial management process.

It usually supports budgeting with revenue management, tracking expense, financial forecasting, profitability insights, and client invoicing. It can also provide integrated time tracking for billable hours management.

Business budgeting software can also deliver different types of visualizations (usually with flexible customization) to help business professionals get easy-to-understand insights into financial performance and key metrics. 

Productive is one of the best budgeting software for professional services firms. It offers a variety of features that support client project management, while delivering in-depth insights on business financial performance.

By using Productive, you’ll be able to switch from using different CRM, HRM, time trackers, billing, and task tracking tools to a centralized platform for budgeting.

Some of Productive’s key features for business budgeting include:

Let’s explore these features in more detail:

With Productive’s Budgeting feature, professionals service businesses can build budgets of various types. Productive includes support for fixed-price, hourly, retainer, or mixed billing models. 

You can also create budget templates to kickoff new projects more easily.

When you’ve got your rates and budgets all set up, Productive helps you monitor this data in real time. You can track budget burn and profitability, and set up custom alerts for improved spend management.

Productive also includes overhead management, expenses tracking, and revenue recognition for more accurate insights into business finances.

Productive’s overhead calculator spreads overhead costs per hour, which means that you can understand your true profit margin across clients and make better financial decisions.

Expense tracking also includes Purchase Orders. Expenses can be managed through the platform, added to your budgeting, and even forecasted.

Productive’s financial management doesn’t stop at real-time financial reports; you can also forecast your metrics to predict your future budgeting performance.

Financial forecasting is based on your employee scheduling, so you can predict metrics for months in advance to see how your project is performing. 

If you’re significantly over budget, you can also see how much of an impact this has on your profit margins. 

Another metric that can be forecasted is utilization, which provides useful insights into your workforce planning.

How utilized will certain teams be? Do you need to look for specific project types, or hire additional staff?

Productive provides you with full certainty while making these crucial business decisions.

Once you’re ready to deliver a budget, you can create an invoice by pulling information from your budget – whether uninvoiced time entries on hourly projects or the remaining amount of the budget on fixed-price projects.

Productive’s Billing also includes useful automation and AI features that help businesses manage invoicing and expenses.

With automations, an invoice draft can be created when certain conditions are met on budgets (for ex. when a budget is created or updated).

And, with Productive AI, you can upload your invoice and receipt, and the expense details will be autofilled.

This is just one example of how Productive simplifies the invoicing process for business owners.

Additionally, Productive includes tax rate management, invoicing for multiple currencies, and reporting for overdue, left for invoicing, and already invoiced amounts.

Another one of Productive’s features that supports the budgeting process is Reporting. 

Productive can become the single source of truth for all your business operations.

All your activities on the platform power up real-time reports, such as budgets and profitability per client, invoicing amounts and status, forecasted profitability and revenue, overall project progress, and much more.

Productive includes over 50 professional services report templates that can be customized with business specific information, and added to custom dashboards.

These reports can also be sent automatically (at specific intervals) to Slack or email addresses to effortlessly keep clients and teams in the loop.

Productive’s Resource Planning feature lets managers create comprehensive resource plans while taking into account the full picture of team availability and capacity.

Thanks to time entries and integrated leave management, managers can accurately gauge which employees are being over- or under-utilized and balance their resources accordingly. 

Any changes you make in your scheduling will update your forecasted data. 

This makes managing a resource plan in Productive much more efficient and reliable than manually updating data in an Excel sheet.

Productive’s project management support includes Task Management and Time Tracking features.

With Productive, you can create your customizable wokspace for collaboration, simplifying the process of managing tasks and dependencies.

Switch between different project views, including Kanban, Gantt, Workload, and more.

With built-in time tracking, team members can keep track of their hours however they most prefer, either by running the timer while they’re working on tasks, by duplicating previous entries, or by entering data into time entries retroactively.

Accurate time tracking powers up both your budgeting capabilities and your resource planning, by letting you track costs per service, as well as billable and non-billable hours to get agency utilization rates.

Some of Productive’s additional features include:

Productive offers seamless integrations with HR, accounting, and collaboration tools.

Integrations include Slack, Google Calendar, and Outlook for scheduling and updates; Xero and QuickBooks for accounting and invoicing; BambooHR, Breathe, Humaans.io for HRM; Memtime for time tracking; and more.

Try out Productive with a 14-day free trial today.

Workday is a cloud-based accounting software that offers strategic planning and money management support to a wide range of industries, from healthcare, consumer, professional and business services, to technology and media. Workday provides a suite of solutions with Workday Adaptive Planning, Workday Financial Management, Workday HCM, and more.

Key features:

As Workday doesn’t offer transparent pricing on its website, this means that engagement with the vendor is necessary prior to getting all essential information. Additionally, the choice between multiple modules can complicate your decision-making.

When it comes to customer reviews, Workday Adaptive Planning is the best-rated out of Workday’s offerings, with a 4.3 score on G2 and a 4.5 score on Capterra. Overall, Workday is a good choice for businesses that are able to invest some time and money into making the best decision. For a simpler process, you might want to consider an all-in-one ERP for service providers instead.

Sage Intacct is a cloud accounting and financial management solution from the leading provider of ERP solutions, Sage Group. Sage Intacct supports a wide range of industries and businesses of all sizes with their financial processes and accounting tasks.

Key features:

The most frequently underlined downside of Sage Intacct is the complexity: users report that it takes some time getting used to the platform, and even more time to master it.

Others have noted that the pricing makes the tool geared more towards larger companies. For businesses on a limited budget or dynamic schedule, considering a streamlined, comprehensive solution that combines project management with finances might be a good idea.

We also covered Sage Intacct in our list of the top BigTime alternatives.

Xero is a budgeting software tailored to small businesses. As for the pros of Xero, reviewers on Capterra describe the budgeting software as “very intuitive” and “easy to use”, and praise it for improving their efficiency and financial analysis capabilities.

Key features:

As for the cons, some users note that the reports could be more detailed and that they are somewhat restrictive when it comes to pulling the information you need.

Overall, Xero is a fine specialized solution to consider for cash management if you’re running a small business, especially as an integration to a more comprehensive agency management tool with robust budgeting and financial planning features.

What Xero doesn’t have is an integration of project management and advanced budgeting features. For this, you’ll want an all-in-one time and billing software solution.

QuickBooks is an online small business budgeting and accounting software solution. Reviewers on G2 state that QuickBooks Online is “easy to learn” and requires no previous accounting experience, with other users underlining that it helps them keep track of their financial performance in one place.

Key features:

Although QuickBooks Online has plenty of good reviews praising its simplicity and user-friendly interface, there’s a notable amount of negative reviews that mostly comment on issues with customer support. Even some positive or neutral reviews comment that it takes some time for requests or problems to be resolved.

Overall, like Xero, QuickBooks Online can complement your more robust project management tools with its accounting capabilities. Keep in mind that time tracking is a separate feature available in QuickBooks Time.

Check out some alternatives, such as our list of the top strategic workforce planning software or Time Doctor competitors.

Business budgeting software is usually used by the financial department within a company, including the accounting team and CFO, but it’s also a useful tool for business analysts, project managers, and heads of various departments. 

The best business budgeting software tool provides comprehensive support for all levels of project management. Ideally, it should have an intuitive interface so that it can be understood by non-finance professional, but also robust enough to cover all business accounting needs.

Aside from helping businesses automate and streamline their expense and cash flow management, financial tools also contribute to the elimination of human error.

A study by Raymond R. Panko provides details into the types of errors that commonly appear during Excel or Google sheet management: these range from quantitative errors attributed to the program itself to qualitative errors such as typos, logical errors, and perhaps most dangerous of all due to the difficulty of detecting them, errors of omission.

To give a practical example, there are some famous cases of business budgeting mistakes driven by faulty use of Excel, such as the undervaluation of Tesla’s purchase of Solar City due to double counting debt in a spreadsheet (Wired).

This is not to say that you need to shelve Excel entirely, only that using spreadsheets for budgeting in combination with financial planning tool is recommended in to ensure data accuracy.

Another challenge of manual budgeting is continuous planning – often, project progress is impeded by unforeseen roadblocks or new client requests. Adjusting for these changes in an Excel sheet is a timely process, especially prone to errors due to its time sensitivity.

Financial planning tools can account for these changes with forecasting capabilities, boosting your project planning, collaboration, and project accountability.

To summarize, some of the key benefits of business budget software are the following:

There are two main types of software that provide budgeting features, depending on how information is stored:

Although the type of software you choose will depend on your industry and agency type, research is skewed more towards cloud-based budgeting software, as data shows that cloud-based solutions result in bigger profitability increases, more efficient consolidation of finances, and quicker data updates due to better connectivity (Aberdeen Group 2018).

Furthermore, research shows a trend in the acceleration of cloud-based software, with 53% of participants saying that their organization increased investments in net-new cloud applications, an increase of more than 15% from 2021 (Harvard Business Review Pulse Survey 2022).

A budgeting software solution can also be differentiated by how robust its budgeting tools are. Basic budgeting software usually includes billable hours management and simple invoicing. More robust financial tools include accounting features such as expense tracking, forecasting, revenue management, and more.

Find out more in our review of the best time billing software.

Though we’ve covered some of the generalized benefits of replacing a manual process with a software solution, there are many other specialized perks of using a business software tool with comprehensive features for budgeting and finance planning.

These are:

In short, implementing the right end-to-end project management software with financial reporting and forecasting tools can:

Check out some firsthand insight from Born Social’s Head of Operations, Kate Higham:

Learn how Productive helps businesses make informed decisions backed up by real-time data.

Nowadays, using budgeting software to support your financial management is the most important step to support your business growth. Choosing the best option will depend on your agency size, your clients, and your business and finance team’s specific needs.

However, there are some general tips and tricks you can use in order to gauge the quality of a vendor.

The first thing you can do is check for user reviews from reputable sites: Although reviews are often subjective, you can get a general feeling for what users enjoy and dislike. Also, aggregated ratings are usually a good indicator of customer experience.

Next, evaluate how frequently a budgeting tool is being updated, and how communicative the vendor is in general. You want to invest in a tool that can grow alongside your business and provide long-term support. Finally, keep an eye out for free trials, as they’re an easy way to get a first impression of a product.

For an all-in-one agency software that can support your agency’s finances, business performance, and all day-to-day processes, book a demo with Productive.