Are you a chief of staff looking to create an effective budget plan? Proactive planning, transparency, and process automation are essential for successful budget management. Here are seven budgeting tips to help you become a better manager and advance your career. To start, you must first identify your income and cash flow for the period. This will help you allocate funds to business expenses.
Spendesk's 7-in-1 expense management platform can give budget managers and finance teams the power to do it all. It can help close the books four times faster, collect more than 95% of receipts on time, and get 100% visibility of company expenses. It is important to review your budgets regularly (once a month is usually reasonable) and to check them for accuracy. If you receive a grant that you weren't expecting, or if your spending estimates aren't correct, these should be included in the budget. All budgets are quantitative plans for the future and will be drawn up based on the needs of the company for which the budget is being created. Once an adequate budget has been created, reporting on actual results will help create a realistic and honest picture of actual operations for managers who review the budget.
Budgeting helps companies consider the costs of their strategies and plans (both in the short and long term). Designing a budget process that examines the organization's priorities and using it to prepare an accurate and balanced budget for the next fiscal year will help you maintain control of the organization's finances and guide the organization's work. John Wong, senior associate director of Financial Planning and Analysis at Harvard Business School Online, suggests using historical data as a reference rather than as a starting point for budgeting. The implementation of a company's strategic plan often begins by determining management's basic expectations about future economic, competitive, and technological conditions, and their effects on anticipated goals, both long and short term. Organizations like SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives) exist to help with things like budgeting. When planning your budget, it is best to be conservative in your estimates to increase your chances of staying within it throughout the year.
Meanwhile, a larger organization may rely on a member of the accounting department to generate a company-wide budget. Understanding the main initiatives and what it will take to implement them, as well as what you've spent in previous years on similar expenses, can help you include them in your budget, even if you're not sure of their exact values. While you'll likely use the spreadsheet to keep track of your finances, you can also present your budget in a way that everyone in the organization can understand. Accountants should be aware of this circumstance and use ethical standards when helping to develop and create budgets. By preparing your budget taking into account your organization's mission and a detailed set of results, you can develop a roadmap for evaluating performance once the fiscal year begins. These seven tips will help you create an effective budget plan as a chief of staff.
Proactive planning, transparency, process automation, regular reviews, historical data reference points, conservative estimates, and understanding initiatives are all key components for successful budget management. With these tips in mind, you can become a better manager and advance your career.
