Budgeting

A well-functioning budget is more than a set of procedures - it provides a focus to analyse your key financial and strategic goals.

What is a budget?
Why budget - what are the advantages?
Key Facts - FAQs
Publications and resources
Case Studies

What is a budget?

Essentially, it is a plan translated into money and a tool for allocating resources and implementing strategic plans. It charts a way of allocating and maximising the use of your resources and ideally, identifies financial problems that could arise in the coming year.

The budget also provides indicators for evaluating employee performance and gives your staff goals to reach and steps to achieve them. A budget - be it an organisation-wide budget or specific project budget - must be carefully planned.

Not all budgets are alike. Some planning should happen before your budget is developed.

Why budget - what are the advantages?

In addition to its value in allocating resources and implementing strategic plans, a budget can produce a wide range of other beneficial results. Programme personnel directly involved in carrying out activities can use it to measure their accomplishments numerically and to respond to unexpected changes. Management can use it to evaluate staff performance.

But like any tool, a budget can produce good or bad results, depending on the skill and diligence with which it is used.

Continue this topic: pros and cons of budgeting