A method and system for providing a customized start-up budget for a new business leverages actual business start-up data associated with one or more actual businesses in one or more locations collected by various financial management systems to provide a customized start-up budget for a new business that includes a listing of the business start-up budget categories and/or business start-up budget sub-categories associated with starting up a proposed business in a particular area and the average, or otherwise weighted, amounts spent in each of the business start-up budget categories and/or business start-up budget.