In everyday business life, it is not always easy to make the right decisions. You have to consider many aspects and factors and often have to assess the effect of certain measures without any experience. How successful your company is depends on one thing in particular: the basis on which your decisions are made. It's good that you can put your decisions on a solid footing with a cost-benefit analysis.
With the right template, you can quickly create such an analysis to check and improve the profitability of your investments. In this article, you can find out why this makes sense and how you can easily create a template yourself and carry out a cost-benefit analysis.
What is a cost-benefit analysis?
A cost-benefit analysis, or CBA for short, is a profitability analysis. It compares the relationship between costs and benefits in order to create an evaluation basis for business decisions. A CBA is used to examine the advantages and disadvantages of investments and assess financial risks, evaluate measures and analyze the sustainability of investments. In order to obtain an optimal overview, it is advisable to carry out the cost-benefit analysis using a template.
The advantage here is that you can bundle all the factors and effects associated with an investment in just one database, so you don't lose track. Especially with large projects, there are a large number of objective and subjective criteria that affect the CBA in very different ways. A template helps you to keep track of all these aspects.

Benefit from a cost-benefit analysis. Image rights: amazing studio / Adobe Stock
Where is a cost-benefit analysis used?
The larger a project is, the larger its investment sum usually is. While the costs of an investment are usually quite easy to determine, the specific benefits are much more difficult to identify. The reason for this is that neither the success nor the impact of a measure can be reliably predicted and quantified in advance. In addition, the benefits of an investment are often subject to a subjective assessment by the decision-makers.
A CBA helps to clearly document all possible factors that have an impact on a business decision and to evaluate them objectively and neutrally across departments. It is advantageous to use a database for this. Because if you create your cost-benefit analysis using a template, everyone involved can work on the same basis. This means that no data is lost, important aspects are not overlooked and additional factors that other departments consider relevant can be easily added.
Use cases for a CBA
Basically, a cost-benefit analysis is always appropriate when major financial investments are planned. It is particularly suitable if, for example
- want to modernize your IT equipment
- Planning conversion measures for your business
- Offer training and further education measures for your employees
- want to implement new manufacturing processes
- Introduce new business processes
- want to expand your vehicle fleet
A cost-benefit analysis provides you with these advantages
In general, a distinction must be made between two types of benefits: This is because the benefits of an investment can be both tangible and intangible. For example, in addition to increased turnover and greater profit, growing employee satisfaction, improved service quality or a reduction in overtime are also among the plus points that can be achieved with an investment. And this is exactly what you can document with a cost-benefit analysis based on a template.
This means that if you rely on the evaluation of business decisions with a cost-benefit analysis, you have all the factors that influence your decision available at a glance. This means that even small adjustments can be optimally used to identify unnecessary measures and make the right investments.
This should include a cost-benefit analysis
Which aspects are ultimately included in the template for your cost-benefit analyses always depends on the industry in which it is used. This is because different companies have different parameters that affect the costs and benefits of each measure. There is therefore no blueprint that can be applied to all cases. Instead, there are very individual factors that differ from project to project.
However, what applies to any cost-benefit analysis are five basic points that you should clarify before completing your template:
- The implementation - who can carry out the analysis neutrally and objectively?
- The decision-making power - who ultimately decides which measures are used?
- The factor definition - which factors are relevant for the cost-benefit analysis?
- The duration - over what period do you want to consider the costs and benefits of the investment?
- The goals - what do you want to achieve with the investment?
Once these five points have been clarified, you can create the template for your analysis.
Example: CBA in personnel qualification
The following example shows how a cost-benefit analysis in the personnel area can look and which factors a template should contain in this case:
The furniture store "Gemütlich Wohnen" employs a total of ten customer advisors and service staff for its bricks-and-mortar retail stores and for its online store, which it recently opened. In order to improve customer service and customer satisfaction, the owners want to send their ten employees on a two-day communication training course. Put simply, this means that the furniture store will have to close for two days, and the employees will not be able to generate any sales for two days, but will incur additional costs.
On the other hand, there is the profit that this further training measure could bring. The business owners know the exact costs of the training, i.e. course fees, accommodation, travel and loss of earnings. They have also defined a figure for the expected benefit in the form of improved work processes and increased turnover. In order to be able to assess whether this investment is worthwhile, the business owners prepare the following cost-benefit analysis:
Effort factor | Costs | Benefit factor | Expected benefit |
---|---|---|---|
Course fee | 2.500 € | Improved workflows | 3.300 € |
Travel expenses | 1.500 € | increased sales | 16.000 € |
Overnight stay | 1.650 € | ||
Loss of earnings | 2.200 € | ||
Total cost | Total benefits | ||
7.850 € | 19.300 € |
The CBA allows the business owners to compare the total costs of 7,850 euros with the expected total benefit of over 19,000 euros. This enables them to see that the planned investment would be worthwhile in the long term.
Special forms of CBA
In addition to the classic cost-benefit analysis, there are other forms and methods for quantifying the profitability of projects and ensuring the efficient use of financial resources.
- Cost minimization studies / Cost minimization studies:
Here you evaluate the costs of different methods (e.g. healthcare treatments) and compare them with each other. Each method must achieve a comparable result (e.g. full recovery). The most favorable method wins. - Cost-effectiveness analysis:
This is a tool for assessing the cost-effectiveness of projects whose benefits cannot be measured in monetary terms (e.g. lives saved, satisfied customers, improved environmental quality). The result is a quotient of the costs or monetary units divided by the benefits or outcome units. - Cost-utility analysis:
This analysis is one of the qualitative, non-monetary methods of decision theory. You can also evaluate complex issues and minimize the risk of wrong decisions by including non-monetarily measurable factors such as increasing quality.
You can find a suitable template here
You can also carry out your cost-benefit analysis manually using simple tables, but it is more convenient to use an intelligent database that automatically calculates the desired values using formulas and links.
Have the advantages of a cost-benefit analysis convinced you? Then you will find the corresponding template here. If you don't have a SeaTable account yet, you can register for free. Give it a try!