What is Budgeting and How Can It Help You?

Budgeting is the process of creating a plan for spending your money. This spending plan, also known as a budget, allows you to determine in advance if you have enough money to do the things you need or would like to do. Budgets can be made for a person, a group of people, a company, a government, or anything else that generates and spends money. A budget is a calculation plan, generally but not always financial, for a defined period, often a year or a month. It can include expected sales and revenue volumes, amounts of resources such as time and costs, environmental impacts such as greenhouse gas emissions, other impacts, assets, liabilities, and cash flows.

Companies, governments, families and other organizations use budgets to express strategic business plans in measurable terms. When making your budget, it's important to make sure that it contains enough information so that you can easily monitor key factors in your business such as sales, costs and working capital. Additionally, if you have an income that covers all bills with leftover money, a budget can help maximize savings and investments. This approach is especially useful for a new company that has no historical performance trendlines on which to base its budget estimates. Be realistic about how many products you think you'll actually sell each month - not what you want to sell each month. A budget is used to forecast the financial results and financial position of an entity for a future period.

It should be reviewed and updated regularly to ensure accuracy. Alternatively, you can use a flexible budget in which the variable costs within the budget are modified depending on the actual sales levels recorded during the reporting period. Budgets are developed for all the different subsidiaries, divisions, and departments of an organization. An emergency fund should be included in the budget as a buffer while the rest of the budget is established; this should replace the use of credit cards for emergency situations. The budget is published in a package that describes the standards and procedures used to develop it. Thanks to budgeting software, creating and managing budgets doesn't have to be difficult.

A budget can express a surplus or provide resources for future use; alternatively it can show a deficit in which expenses exceed revenues or other resources.