It’s a new month, quarter, and half of the year! I was recently asked to have a look at a friend’s content performance and asked them for their content plan and budget. “It’s embarrassing to admit but we don’t have any” – nothing embarrassing about it, plenty of companies are on the same boat. We used to be in exactly the same situation – we were assigning content to our writers on Asana, but we didn’t have the information on all the posts by type, and budget spend, in one place. We only introduced one this year, but counting the writers’ fees was still done on Asana. Only recently our head of content started building a tracker in Notion with linked databases to track the post by type, with spending by writer and editor.

While this may be too complicate to recreate and implement for most content teams, I created a simpler version in of a Content Budget Tracker in Google Sheets – which allows you to track budget spend per month by individual article, post type, and writer, using nested countifs and sumifs formulas.

So download your “Content Budget Tracker – by writer & post type” HERE 👇

How to use it?

1. Fill in your post information in the first tab “Tracker”:
Put in your post title, KW, SV, KD etc. in the empty cells:

2. Use dropdowns for the “Month”, “Article Type”, “Writer” and “Word Count”.

If you want to change the wordcount ranges, you will also need to update them in the formula in column “L” – as this formula calculates the writer’s fees based on the pre-defined fees for wordcounts ranges, e.g. =if(H28=”<2000″,”$300″,if(H28=”2001-2500″,”$350″,if(H28=”2501-3000″,”$400″,if(H28=”3001-3500″,”$450″,if(H28=”>3501″,”$500″)))))

3. You can override the calculated feed for specific post types (e.g. if you’re paying less for AI content than original content) or specific writers (if you agreed on a different fee for some)

4. To check your budget spend for the month, go to the 2nd tab: Content budget tracking & reporting:

In this tab, you can see:

• number of posts produced in a month, in TOTAL + by type
• cost of posts produced in a month, in TOTAL + by type
• the % of TOTAL budget spent in a given month

5. To check how much you owe each writer, go to the last tab: “Writer’s fees”:

You can see the number & cost of articles per month per writer here.

❗ If you want to replace the labels “writer1”, “writer2” etc. with names, remember to update them (you need to keep them the same!) in the dropdown in column “K” in the “Tracker” sheet:

Hope this helps you keep track of your content budget and payments as you scale! Let me know if you have any questions!