What Is Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA)?
Your cost benefit analysis (CBA) helps you evaluate the financial feasibility of a decision by comparing its expected costs and benefits, by assigning value to these verticals, and analyzing the potential outcomes. This way, every investment, project, or policy change in your organization can be properly evaluated before determining whether worthwhile or not.
Why Do You Need a Cost Benefit Analysis Template?
Downloading our cost and benefit analysis Excel template comes with several benefits, as the template was built to promote:
- Data-driven decision-making, because it provides objective insights into financial viability.
- Optimized resource allocation, because it helps prioritize projects with the highest return.
- Improved risk management, because it identifies potential financial risks before committing resources.
- Greater transparency, because it offers clear justifications for financial decisions.
- Standardized Financial Comparisons, because it enables benchmarking across multiple investment opportunities.
Who Is It For?
This cost benefit analysis template was created by a team of Financial Analysts and Accountants with decades of expertise in the field. However, the template addresses both Financial Analysts/ Accountants and:
- Finance & budgeting teams
- Operations & supply chain managers
- Government & policy-makers
Download the Template
If you fall into any of these categories (or are simply looking for a cost value analysis template from a different position), you can download our Excel template to:
- Evaluate investment decisions and assess the impact of potential costs and returns
- Support strategic planning, resource allocation, and budget approvals
- Analyze the financial viability of a new product launch, project, or process improvement
- Assess market trends, regulatory impacts, and policy decisions
Here are just some of the use cases you might need this Excel template for:
- Investment & capital expenditure decisions – Assessing the profitability of new investments.
- Product development – Determining the potential return on launching a new product.
- Process improvement & automation – Evaluating cost savings from workflow automation.
- Marketing & advertising campaigns – Measuring the effectiveness of marketing spend.
- Mergers & acquisitions – Analyzing the financial impact of acquiring a company.
- Hiring & outsourcing decisions – Comparing in-house hiring versus outsourcing for cost efficiency.
- IT & software implementations – Assessing the ROI of adopting new technologies.
How It Works
Once you download the template, you are free to use it and leverage everything it offers:
- The multi-year cost and benefit statement visualized with Zebra BI Tables for a clear breakdown of financials over time.
- Small multiples to visualize trends in key performance drivers, allowing for comparative analysis.
- Area chart to illustrate the break-even point, ensuring users can easily identify when benefits outweigh costs.
- Zebra BI tables to visualize plan scenarios and compare pessimistic and optimistic projections of the future.
- Bridge chart to explain the main drivers of net benefits, offering a transparent view of cost-benefit contributions.
Why Choose This Template?
Not only is this cost-benefit analysis template ready to use in seconds, but the Zebra BI features and the way we have structured it will enable you to:
- Make better, more data-driven decisions by using objective insights into the financial viability of your project or investment
- Optimize resource allocations, so you can prioritize projects with high returns
- Improve risk management, as it enables you to quickly identify potential financial risks before committing resources
- Boost transparency across the organization, as the template enables you to offer clear justifications for financial decisions
- Showcase standardized financial comparisons that promote benchmarking across multiple investment opportunities
This template is ready to use out of the box and enhanced with all the features you need to visualize and analyze your costs and benefits in the easiest, clearest, and most straightforward way possible. Download it today and reap all the benefits of:
Zebra BI tables with:
- Automatic variance analysis: Instantly highlights cost and revenue variances across different scenarios, ensuring clear and actionable insights.
- Integrated waterfall charts: Automatically generated to visualize cost and revenue flow, making it easy to see the impact of changes.
- Optimized report canvas: Ensures efficient use of space while maximizing insights.
- Commentary & annotations: Add explanations directly to the report, improving transparency and traceability.
- Multiple scenarios in one view: Easily compare various business scenarios without complex Excel workarounds.
Zebra BI charts with:
- Monthly Trends & Variance Analysis: Clearly visualize cost trends, revenue growth, and performance shifts over time.
- Instant Insight into Trends & Variances: Automatic highlighting of key patterns, compliant with IBCS (International Business Communication Standards).
- Flexible Chart Types: Easily switch between different chart types, including bridge charts, without losing insights.
- Comment Markers for Context: Annotate key points directly on the chart to improve communication.
- Out-of-the-Box Standardization: Ensures a consistent, professional look without the need for manual adjustments.
Bonus benefit?
No need for manual formulae, complex conditional formatting, and excessive cell linking. Just clean, clear data, ready to be presented and analyzed.
Start exploring your data today
No more guesswork and projects your business engages off the cuff. Download Zebra BI's cost-benefit analysis template and standardize decision-making, promote a culture of data-driven project management, and enable high-quality, efficient resource allocation.
Make informed decisions that lead to successful outcomes, not surprises!
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February 22nd
16 Apr 2025 
