How to Manage Your Business As Well As Your Budget

It can be tough running your own business, rather than getting their hands dirty and getting on with the project you’ve been dreaming about, you get bogged down in spread sheets and tied up with budgeting.

Small to medium sized business owners spend half their time securing funds, planning how to spend them and then invest the other half biting their nails to a nub over spread sheets and forecasting formulae’s. If a budget get out of control it can live a life of its own – this can be very dangerous.

What you need is a strategy in order to deal with the budget at the start of every month. Here are some tips to keep a lid on your budget, to keep it under control and to allow you to go back to what you do best, running your business, not your budget.

Like learning any new skill, it won’t all come together at once. You’ll need to accept this from the very start so you don’t make such a big deal with the mistakes you make along the way. When making your first budget, give yourself some breathing room. There’s no telling what will crop up around the corner and cause you to back pedal on those first crazy months of running your own business. But if you’ve got some money in reserve to fall back on, then it can make getting back to work a lot easier.

It’s always better to be a little pessimistic when you’re thinking about your budget. Predicting that you’ll spend a little more than you should and earn a little less than you think is never really a bad thing. You’re not manipulating the numbers, you’re just being a bit conservative.

When it comes to the end of the month and it turns out that you’ve earned more than you thought you would, and spent less, then you’ll have a little more in the company kitty for the next month. As the months go by you can afford to be a little less pessimistic each time, but remember to always leave yourself a little breathing space to fall back on should things go wrong.

Once you’ve been plodding along for a while, making a reasonable success of yourself, the challenges you face on a day to day basis will begin to increase. You could find yourself in the centre of a budgeting nightmare at any point in your career, which is why you need to continue to add to your fall back reserve. The bigger you get, the bigger the blows will come in terms of expenses, equipment and other fees, meaning that you’ll have to have money in the bank in order to cover any of these extra expenses.

Getting the right software to manage your budget can do wonders for your business. By being able to drill down into the specific spends you’ll be able to see where your money is going and when it went there. There are a number of budgeting software facilitators on the market at the moment. The amount of detail you can go into with these programmes is extremely impressive as well as being easy to understand and talk through with other members of the team. So next time you feel like you’re going cross-eyed looking ad spread sheets in Microsoft excel, you might want to invest in something that’s going to make your life, and your budgeting strategy, a whole lot easier.

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