Twelve Tips to Help You Prepare Your Business Budget
A budget is a crucial planning tool for managing a business. Your annual budget will help you control costs and provide you with targets against which you can monitor the performance of the company. A budget, though, is not a statement of what you want to happen; it is a realistic forecast of what you expect to happen. Some businesses, however, do create three different budgets to reflect the best case, worst case, and most likely scenarios. So, where do you start the budgeting process, and how do you make your budget as accurate as possible? Here are twelve tips to guide you through the budgeting process. 1. Two Approaches The first question you will need answering is where to start preparing a business budget. Well, you have two options. You can either begin the budgeting process by forecasting your costs and target profits and then calculating the sales you will need, or you can predict your sales and then adjust your expenses to achieve the desired net profit. ...