Business Planning And Budgeting

Document and follow a process for preparing an annual budget, with steps that could include: Where the profit and loss statement is prepared on a monthly basis, your budget will need to be separated into months for the budget period.Regular monitoring of your budget against actual results provides information on whether your business is on track to meet the goals you were aiming for when you first prepared your budget.

Financial planning and budgeting are critical to the success and sustainability of a business entity – for-profit or otherwise.

Financial plans and budgets are an integral part of strategic planning that is indispensable in the deployment and allocation of resources to achieve the entity's both long-term and short-term objectives.

Planning and Budgeting is an analytical application that helps you set top-down targets and generate a bottom-up budget, which is at the foundation of your organization's operations.

It helps management evaluate business alternatives and set financial targets, and it enables the organization to work cooperatively and efficiently through the budgeting iterative process—reevaluating expenses and revenue estimates; changing start and end dates; and modifying objectives.

By committing these numbers to paper, your chances of succeeding with your business are helped by anticipating future needs, spending, profits and cash flow.

Business Planning And Budgeting

It also may let you spot problems before they mushroom, so that you can switch gears."It's like a roadmap for your company," says Victor Butcher, of Butcher Financial Services in Memphis, Tenn., a former president of the Tennessee Society of Certified Public Accountants' Memphis Chapter who advises small businesses.

It's better to find out that you can't afford new office space before you commit to spending a certain amount of money every month. You can use this information to adjust your plans or expectations going forward.

A 12-month budget can be updated with actual expenditures and revenues each month so that you know you're on target.

It's usually prepared annually – although the period can be shorter or longer depending on what you're using the budget for.

Income and expense information is set against the business operating plans for the budget period.