Budgeting Basics and Beyond 2nd Edition

Book Preface

Better budgets can boost your department and your career to higher levels of performance and success. Savvy executives use the budgeting process to take stock of their direction, refine their goals, and share their mission with their staff. Their budgeting reveals their position in the market, places untapped resources at their command, and motivates all employees to greater levels of productivity. They use their budgets to propel them towards the top of their industry. This book will show you how to get there.

Budgeting Basics and Beyond shows you how the budget can be your most powerful tool for strategy and communications. It points out that the budget brings into stark relief all of the factors that every manager must consider, such as industry conditions, competition, degree of risk, stability of operations, capacity limitations, pricing policies, turnover rates in assets, production conditions, product line and service considerations, inventory balances and condition, trends in the marketplace, number of employees and their technical abilities, availability and cost of raw materials, available physical resources, technological considerations, economy, and political aspects. Then it uncovers the role each of those factors plays in achieving your corporate goals. And since those goals cannot be achieved single-handedly, this book suggests ways to use the budget to help each employee appreciate how they will contribute to the division’s profitability.

Aside from playing a vital role in creating and achieving a sound business strategy, this book shows how budgets can increase your effectiveness every day of the week. In particular, it delivers these on-the-job budgeting tools:

Techniques for preparing more accurate, realistic, and reliable estimates
Control and variance analysis devices that signal revenue, cost, and operations thresholds
Pricing guidelines for products and services
Planning and scheduling production and related costs
Profit planning and identifying looming problems
Financial models that show the relationship among all facets of the business
Spreadsheet applications for planning, budgeting, and control purposes