Google Sheets templates help you create better spreadsheets while saving you valuable time.
A template knows what you need and offers it without any manual input, giving you the ability to focus on more important things — such as making sense of the data itself.
In this post, we’ll cover every template you’ll ever need to easily and efficiently use Google Sheets for business, including templates for project management, reporting, people management, and customer tracking.
You’ll learn:
1. Why you should use Google Sheets templates for business;
2. Step-by-step instruction on how to find the built-in Google Sheets templates;
3. A roundup of additional Google Sheets templates for any marketing role, including:
Let’s get started.
Why use Google Sheets templates for business?
Google Sheets templates are a fantastic business tool that can be used by teams of any size. Whether you’re a business just starting out or an established enterprise firm, you’ll enjoy countless benefits when using Google Sheets templates.
Even if you don’t use them as your primary business tool, they can supplement other tools. For instance, you might use a free CRM to track customer information, then use a Google Sheets invoice template to quickly create invoices for each customer.
Let’s go over the top benefits of using Google Sheets templates for business.
Free
Google Sheets templates are completely free to use, and they cover a wide variety of needs. So you won’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting an Excel subscription (or a subscription for another tool). Simply have everyone sign up for a Google Workspace account and get immediate working access to the templates.
Ability to Collaborate
Google Sheets templates allow your team to collaborate with little gatekeeping. The only thing you have to do is click the “Share” button at the top right-hand corner of a document, and your team members will have access to the file.
You can also limit the collaboration aspect to commenting or viewing only. This is a great option for sensitive documents that only a few people should edit.
Intuitive to Use
To use a Google Sheets template, you need very little experience with spreadsheets. You don’t need to know advanced formulas and functions to make them work for you. The templates already come with all of the fields and calculations built-in. All you have to do is plug in the numbers and populate the fields, and the document will generate a report or calculate a total.
Customizable
That you’re using a template doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with its look and feel. You can easily change the fields, the colors, and the fonts using Google Sheets’ built-in tools. Once you do, you’ll feel like the template is your business’ only.
No Data Loss
Another great benefit of using Google Sheets templates? Unless a freak accident happens with Google’s servers, it’s near impossible to lose data. All changes are stored in the cloud, and Google Sheets includes a version history of the document, where you can revert to a previous version if something happens.
If your laptop crashes or you lose internet connection, Google Sheets simply freezes the copy until you’re online again. You’ll still want to take a few precautions, such as enabling offline editing and downloading a copy of the document to your local drive.
Ready to find a few templates that you can start using right now for your business?
How to Find Templates In Google Sheets
There are two common ways you can find and use free Google Sheets templates.
1. Google’s In-Built Template Gallery
On your browser, go to Google Sheets. Click “Template Gallery” at the top right. Explore the templates to find the right one for you.
You’ll find different templates for your personal, work, and project management needs. Here’s an example of what the Personal template library looks like:
2. Add-Ons
Another way to find free templates in Google Sheets is to download and install the Vertex42 add-on. Here’s how:
Open an existing Google sheet, or type “sheets.new” to create a new one. Then, find and click the “Add-ons” button on the top left menu.
Type “Vertex42” into the search bar, and click enter. Install the add-on.
To access the templates, click on “Add-ons,” then “Template Gallery for Sheets,” then “Browse Templates.”
Here you would find templates that can help with almost everything you need — whether you need to create an invoice, income/expense tracker, or a dashboard to manage your projects.
Let’s now look at some of the free Google Sheets templates you would find useful as you run your business.
Google Sheets Templates
Whether your position requires you to send invoices to clients, track website analytics, or create budget and expense reports, you’ve undoubtedly found yourself working with spreadsheets in some form. And if you’re anything like me, those spreadsheets can feel frustratingly tedious when you’re under a time crunch.
Fortunately, Google Sheets offers a wide variety of pre-built templates, allowing you to create reports and analyze data in spreadsheets faster and more effectively.
The following Google Sheets templates cater to specific categories and allow you to cut hours, if not days, of work in one fell swoop. Let’s go over the best google Sheets templates you can start using now.
Google Sheets Templates for Finances
Spreadsheets are popular tool for bookkeeping and invoicing. Below, you’ll find a curated selection of ready-to-go templates that will allow you to invoice clients, maintain an annual business budget, generate financial statements, create expense reports, and generate purchase reports.
The result is a ton of saved time — there’s no need to create or choose any formulas that will help you calculate this data.
1. Invoices
If you’re a freelancer or work for a small business, you probably use invoices to bill clients for services. This invoice template makes the process simple — it provides space for all the necessary information and looks more professional than a plain spreadsheet. Plus, the template is customizable, so you can create a theme that aligns well with your brand image.
Click here to use this template.
2. Annual Business Budget
This template is more in-depth than it initially appears. There are tabs at the bottom — setup, income, expenses, summary — and each one includes several subcategories. “Expenses,” for instance, covers everything from taxes and insurance to travel and customer acquisition.
The final tab, “summary,” takes your income, subtracts your expenses, and automatically updates to display your ending balance each month. This template is a good option if your budget requires a lot of customization and many moving parts.
Click here to use this template.
3. Financial Statements
The financial statements template truly is an all-in-one resource to keep track of business transactions, profits, and losses. The “profit & loss” tab automatically summarizes revenue, costs, and expenses for the year and can display your growth rate percentage.
If you work for a small business and need to manage much of your finances, this template offers resources and guidance to make the process easier and less prone to human error.
Click here to use this template.
4. Expense Report
Knowing how much you spend is an essential part of running a successful business. But it’s often easy to forget to record these expenses with the amount of work you have to do every day. This simple expense report template makes it easy to record all of your expenses and those of your employees.
Click here to use this template.
5. Purchase Order
You’ll find this template to be a life-saver if tracking the orders or supplies your office/department makes is part of your job. With this sheet, you can save time and avoid the headaches that come with monitoring orders or shipments.
Click here to use this template.
Google Sheet Templates for Reporting and Analytics
Reporting dashboards are typically built into a wide variety of software products, such as Marketing Hub, but if you don’t have the budget, you can easily create one using a Google Sheets template.
The below templates automatically gather data from Google Analytics, putting the data in a highly digestible visual format that you can share with higher-ups and other people in your team.
6. Website Traffic Dashboard
Suppose your role requires you to analyze website traffic using Google Analytics. In that case, this template is a fantastic supplemental tool to pull that data into an organized report, saving you tons of time. Better still, you can use the dashboard template with Supermetrics Google Sheets add-on to monitor and analyze data from PPC, SEO, social media, and website analytics.
Click here to use this template.
7. Website Paid Traffic Report
This template makes the process of analyzing and reporting on paid traffic relatively seamless. The spreadsheet is split into Overview, 12-month Trends, and Medium Breakdown categories. It automatically collects data on your paid sources from Google Analytics and provides a clean chart with important information, including PPC’s percentage of goal conversions, total traffic, and bounce rate.
You can also adjust it to compare different periods or different channels or segments. If you’re looking for a way to demonstrate paid’s influence on your business, this is the tool to do it.
Click here to use this template.
Google Sheet Templates for Customers
If you don’t have access to a CRM yet or your business is still growing, you can use spreadsheets to track customer information and see the growth of your business. The below Google Sheets templates allow you to have a CRM and a sales dashboard without paying the cost typically needed for such software.
Remember, however, that as your business starts to grow and you earn more and more customers, you’ll want to switch over to a dedicated CRM.
8. CRM
To organize your contacts and automate an effective sales and marketing process, you must have a CRM — but if you’re a small company just starting, you might not feel ready to implement a fully established CRM with all the features.
This CRM template is a great place to get your feet wet. It saves automatically, so you never lose data. The share feature allows you to work with coworkers within the CRM, which helps encourage collaboration between your sales and marketing departments.
Click here to use this template.
9. Sales Dashboard
This template helps salespeople manage their leads, sales, and revenue all in one place. At the bottom of the template are different tabs where you can easily input your data that eventually shows up on the main dashboard. There’s also an “instructions” tab to get you up to speed with using the sheet.
Click here to use this template.
Google Sheet Templates for Project Management
Using a Google Sheets project management template is a much more cost-effective alternative to buying a team-wide subscription for a project management software.
The below templates are the absolute best for keeping track of a project’s timeline, creating Gantt charts, creating product roadmaps, and generating action lists. They allow you to color-code and categorize action items and individual tasks.
Hot tip: If you’re managing multiple projects, simply duplicate the initial tab and keep all projects in a single spreadsheet.
10. Project Timeline
Whether this is your first significant project or you’ve been managing projects for years, the project timeline template is a valuable tool for organizing and implementing each project step. The template helps you visually break up a daunting project into smaller pieces, ideally making it easier and less stressful to manage and delegate tasks.
Click here to use this template.
11. Project Tracking
If you’re juggling many projects simultaneously, this project tracking template could become your new best friend. This template takes project management to the next level by enabling you to organize your tasks into categories by date, deliverables, status, cost, and hours — best of all, it lets you prioritize your projects. Hopefully, simply visualizing what needs to get done first will alleviate time-management stress.
Click here to use this template.
12. Event Marketing Timeline
The event marketing template offers organization and structure if you’re implementing an upcoming business event or campaign. It provides categories you might’ve forgotten to consider, including local and national marketing, PR, and web, with subcategories ranging from an email newsletter to impact studies.
The template is already organized with all necessary categories for planning an event, reducing the time you spend on tedious manual input.
Click here to use this template.
13. Gantt Chart Template
The Gantt chart template helps you alleviate any concern you might have over timing — and, when you’ve got a complex project with overlapping components, I’m willing to bet timing is one of your primary concerns.
Using the Gantt chart template helps you visualize all steps and delegate essential tasks more efficiently — labeling the task with an owner on one chart is undoubtedly easier than individually following up via email. And by sharing the template with coworkers, everyone is on the same page.
Click here to use this template.
14. Product Roadmap
Without a product roadmap, it’s easy for your team to misunderstand the direction you want a project to take. With this template, you can solve that problem. The template provides a calendar summary of a project and the milestones and deliverables as you go through the product development process.
Click here to use this template.
15. Product Launch Plan
This template has everything you need to organize the best product launch you’ve ever had. It has fields to help you outline your market and competitive analysis, project strategy, key messaging, and who your target audience is.
If you’re in charge of managing a product launch and want to organize the best launch ever, then this is the project management template for you.
Click here to use this template.
16. Action List With Ranking
Managing a project requires that you track daily actions to ensure you don’t lose focus. But sometimes, you’ll have some tasks on your list that are more important than others. You can easily arrange these tasks based on their importance with this action list template. You can also share this sheet with others if you’re working as a team.
Click here to use this template.
17. Project Budget
Away from the general business budget, most managers create budgets for each of their projects. This project budget template is for you if you’re looking for a simple yet effective template that lets you quickly estimate how much revenue a project would generate and how much it would cost.
Click here to use this template.
Google Sheet Templates for Leading a Team
Managing a team is easy and simple with the following Google Sheets templates. No need to send emails back and forth, and no need to check in individually with each team member over Slack or another team communication app.
With the following templates, you can set employee shifts and track how many hours employees have spent on a certain project. And remember, these templates are collaborative — meaning that you only need to give access to your employees for them to fill it out on their own time. The changes will immediately be live in the shared copy.
18. Employee Shift Schedule
Keeping track of who works what hours, and how much each employee gets paid, can feel confusing, especially if you lead a team of part-time contractors or seasonal interns. This template includes slots for employee’s names, hours worked, and monthly wages, making your paycheck process straightforward and organized.
Click here to use this template.
19. Weekly Timesheet
Like the employee shift schedule, the weekly timesheet helps you track time and know how much to pay employees or subcontractors. However, the weekly timesheet template works better if you want to quickly find out how much time each employee spends on a project.
Click here to use this template.
20. Contact List
This template comes in handy if you want to create a contact list database. You can easily use the template to store your contact information (say, phone number and email address), your employees’ contact, and those of emergency services like the ambulance or fire department.
Click here to use this template.
Start Using These Free Google Sheets Templates
No matter what your job is, using a suitable spreadsheet would make it easier and more enjoyable.
So what are you waiting for? Get started with using these free Google Sheets templates to save time and effort, and download ten additional ones to exponentially improve your productivity.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.