Cost-Benefit Analysis Template
Assess pros and cons and improve your informed decision-making.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Cost Benefit Analysis Template
What is a cost benefit analysis?
Every business decision comes with potential rewards, as well as potential risks. Your decision might expand the business, introduce a new product, or tap into a new supply chain, but it also might cost the organization precious time, money, or social capital. Without a systematic way of analyzing costs and benefits, you may find making decisions an arduous task.
Cost benefit analysis (CBA) is an analytical tool that helps your team assess the pros and cons of moving forward with a business proposal. This technique helps you decide the best course of action to take with a new project by analyzing each option.
When to use a cost benefit analysis
You can use a CBA to compare completed or potential processes, or to estimate the value against the risks of decisions, projects, or processes. Your team can use this powerful, efficient tool in commercial transactions, business decisions, and project investments.
Advantages of using a cost benefit analysis
Organizations make high-stakes choices all the time. Chances are high that your competition is weighing many of the same factors that you are. That’s why it’s crucial to approach decisions in a systematic, methodical way.
A cost benefit analysis allows you to weigh the potential costs of a decision without having to actually incur those costs. It helps your team decide whether the benefits outweigh the costs. If you have no choice but to incur costs, the analysis can provide an estimate for the time it will take to repay those costs.
Perform your own cost benefit analysis
Miro’s whiteboard tool is the perfect canvas to create and share your team’s cost benefit analysis. Get started by selecting this Cost Benefit Analysis Template. Then, follow these steps:
Step 1: Brainstorm costs and benefits. Make a list of each. Try to think of unexpected costs or benefits that your team might not have immediately anticipated. Once you have a list of costs and benefits, think about whether those costs and benefits are likely to change or grow over time.
Step 2: Figure out the monetary value of the costs. Will you need to hire employees? Train them? Will you experience a decrease in productivity while new hires get up to speed? If you introduce a new feature, will your system experience an outage that impacts your customers
Step 3: Now assign a monetary value to the benefits. Do your best to estimate potential revenue, but don’t confine yourself to cash. Think about “soft” benefits like positive word-of-mouth, employee satisfaction, or environmental preservation.
Step 4: Compare your costs and benefits. Which seems greater? How long would it take to repay any costs?
Get started with this template right now.
The Team Canvas
Works best for:
Agile
The Team Canvas is a versatile tool for aligning on goals, roles, and processes. It provides a structured framework for defining purpose, clarifying responsibilities, and visualizing the working environment. By fostering open communication and shared understanding, this template facilitates collaboration and increases team cohesion, empowering you to create a shared vision and drive collective success.
Taco Tuesday Retrospective
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Retrospectives, Meetings
The Taco Tuesday Retrospective template offers a fun and informal approach to retrospectives, perfect for fostering team camaraderie. It provides elements for reflecting on past iterations over a casual taco-themed gathering. This template enables teams to relax, share insights, and brainstorm ideas in a laid-back atmosphere. By promoting social interaction and creativity, the Taco Tuesday Retrospective empowers teams to strengthen relationships, boost morale, and drive continuous improvement effectively.
Spaghetti Diagram Template
Works best for:
Operations, Mapping, Diagrams
Spaghetti diagrams are valuable for finding connections between assets, services, and products, as well as identifying dependencies in a visual way. Use this template to get an overview of a process and quickly find areas of improvement.
Start, Stop, Continue Template
Works best for:
Retrospectives, Meetings, Workshops
Giving and receiving feedback can be challenging and intimidating. It’s hard to look back over a quarter or even a week and parse a set of decisions into “positive” and “negative.” The Start Stop Continue framework was created to make it easier to reflect on your team’s recent experiences. The Start Stop Continue template encourages teams to look at specific actions they should start doing, stop doing, and continue doing. Together, collaborators agree on the most important steps to be more productive and successful.
User Persona Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Desk Research, User Experience
A user persona is a tool for representing and summarizing a target audience for your product or service that you have researched or observed. Whether you’re in content marketing, product marketing, design, or sales, you operate with a target in mind. Maybe it’s your customer or prospect. Maybe it’s someone who will benefit from your product or service. Usually, it’s a whole collection of personalities and needs that intersect in interesting ways. By distilling your knowledge about a user, you create a model for the person you hope to target: this is a persona.
Portfolio Template
Works best for:
Presentations, UX Design
The portfolio template is a way for you to showcase your best work in a visual manner. Think of your work portfolio as a way to present who you are as a professional and describe with more detail what you have achieved and what is your unique expertise. You will use a portfolio template as a way to market yourself to future employers when applying for jobs, universities, and training programs.