You’ll be pleased you did when you come to say, next May and there is a big budget variance and you are wondering “what were we thinking…?”.Īnd if you end up having to hand over budget responsibility due to staff movements, the incoming budget holder will be able to get up to speed much faster if they can understand not just the numbers but also the assumptions behind them. Add a column for notes and/or a separate tab in your spreadsheet to jot down your workings and your thinking behind the numbers. We strongly recommend capturing your assumptions in your budget document. Both are valuable tools when planning and grading a company’s financial health, but although they’re often used interchangeably, they complement rather than substitute each other. Estimate your department expenses for the upcoming fiscal year, track spend against savings, and compare your year-over-year budget numbers by percent changes. Corporations, small business, government departments and philanthropic funders are all more likely to provide funding if they can see there is science behind the numbers. Notes record-low hospital gap, strong position to address FY2024 budget COOK COUNTY, IL Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle today unveiled the preliminary forecast for the County’s Fiscal Year 2024 showing a projected gap of 85.6 million which is down significantly from the height of the pandemic and its 409.6 million gap. Whether budgeting and forecasting are the same process or not has been a source of debate among financial professionals for years. With all of this detailed financial work done, you will be in a stronger position to attract funding too, if opportunities arise. This approach will give you a contingency buffer – so that you have some ‘wriggle’ room if costs blow out for any unforeseen reason or income doesn’t arrive as planned. It pays to be conservative when budgeting income and a bit generous when budgeting for expenses. Financial Forecasting in the Budget Preparation Process. You should therefore be allocating shared costs and/or a management fee to project budgets, because they are a contributor to and user of organisational resources.ĭon’t be too lean – non-profits are excellent at operating ‘on the smell of an oily rag’. Some of these will already be ‘shared’ across the organisation but an additional service offering will usually cause an increase your general overheads, not just at start-up, but going forward.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |