7 budgeting errors businesses should avoid

A budget is a road map for a company to plan, monitor, and update its income and cost streams to attain financial stability. Budgets enable you to monitor your progress toward your goals and to plan and carry out course modifications promptly.

Without a solid and well-planned budget, every firm, even a startup, is dangerously close to collapse.

However, there are several budgeting blunders you should avoid. Let’s examine 7 of them.

1. Exaggerating sales

The worst method to set sales objectives is to look at the previous year’s performance and add a “fair” increase percentage. If you want to set goals that aren’t always under or overachieved, you need to consider more than just the previous year’s performance. It is necessary to consider various factors, such as the size of the market and dynamism, competition, regional expansion, and others.

As with any other goal, the sales quota needs to be innovative. The plan must be clear, quantifiable, doable, practical, and time-bound. Present-day sales software almost universally enables you to synthesise historical performance, rep performance, market growth, and company foresight into a single coherent and attainable aim.

You can also base your sales goal on a rolling projection. With this method, budgeting is done by reviewing the previous quarter’s performance and determining the subsequent quarter’s budget. After all, why should your budget remain static if the economy, market, and client demands are not?

2. Budgetting not based on data

Hard statistics, not educated guesses or intuition, form the foundation of an appropriate budget. The first issue you must consider is whether you will create your budget from the top down or the bottom up. Top-down budgeting involves setting a sales goal and allocating resources to cover those expenditures. Budgeting from the bottom up flips the process.

Review last year’s budget to see where you ran short on money or went overboard on expenditures. Determine what’s causing these problems and how to fix them. Doing this will give you a better idea of how much you will need for your budget for the coming year.

But don’t make your projections based solely on last year’s spending plan. Factors such as the state of the economy and market shifts help you anticipate where your spending and earnings could diverge from the previous year.

Imagine owning a printing business and that paper costs have increased by 15% in the past year. In addition to accounting for this increase in raw material costs, you must also predict if this trend will extend into the following year.

Determine your predicted sales first, then your fixed and variable costs. Compare your performance to the allocated amount from the previous year. Consider how operational modifications could affect these figures. For instance, introducing a new product would increase development and marketing expenses and a new revenue stream.

3. Not keeping track of income and costs

Making a detailed and well-thought-out budget is essential, but so is constantly checking your progress against it. Keeping tabs on the money coming and going from your organisation is critical for making informed choices. Creating a budget and not sticking to it is a huge mistake, but failing to monitor it is even more detrimental.

By periodically reviewing your budget statistics, you can catch underperforming income streams and expenditure categories where you’re overspending. You may quickly make necessary corrections thanks to the review. For instance, you may find and address the causes of a product’s poor sales performance.

Some fundamental actions you should take to keep an eye on your spending include:

• Selecting a suitable accounting system.
• Joining your financial institutions together.
• Keeping track of each cost.
• Using an expenditure management app.
• Planning and controlling your spending with an accounting automation platform.

Integrating the banking institutions you use with your accounting software may simplify small company spending monitoring. Although many small businesses are afraid to link their accounting software to the banks they operate, it is a secure and trustworthy approach to keeping track of your spending. Your data is protected thanks to built-in security measures used by financial institutions.

You can download all financial transactions straight to your accounting software by connecting your firm to your bank. The information will often be instantly sent to the proper account, making it simple to track spending.

You can simplify generating and monitoring your budget for your business by using platforms like Wallester.

You may check your budget in real-time using expense management applications, which automate the time-consuming and prone-to-mistake process of manually entering expenses.

4. Not planning for unforeseen costs

Organisations function in a dynamic environment, so they may occasionally face circumstances that need unforeseen, unplanned costs. Another budgeting error you should avoid is failing to plan for unexpected expenses. You may manage these expenditures without jeopardising your ability to make ends meet if you set aside money in your budget for an emergency fund. As a general guideline, your emergency reserve should equal around 5% of your planned costs.

Your emergency reserve is your safety net if your vendor raises pricing due to rising raw material costs. If you fail to budget for unforeseen expenses, you’ll have to borrow or sell off assets to pay for them. You may access the money in an emergency fund when you need it. After that, you may use your earnings to top out the draw.

Alternatively, you could start the fund with a predetermined allocation and then add a small monthly contribution from your sales. In the months you don’t need it, that will assist the emergency fund development, and the unused allocation functions as an additional source of savings and investment.

5. Making improbable objectives

Many businesses, unfortunately, still make the mistake of overestimating sales and underestimating costs when creating their annual budgets. Unless you have a tiny market share, are introducing a new product, or are entering a new niche, planning for a 25% year-over-year increase in a market expanding at 5% is asking for problems.

However, underestimating costs is just as bad as creating inflated sales projections. While it is possible to correctly predict recurring charges like rent and salary, estimates for variable costs like goods or marketing expenses can range widely from year to year. It’s preferable to be conservative than enthusiastic when creating a spending plan. Looking for methods to save is another good practice.

Let’s pretend you only deal with one supplier and buy everything they provide. If you need the product, try to find a different supplier that can give it.

You may acquire cheaper rates from the two vendors by adding competition to your supply chain, forcing them to fight for your business. As an alternative, suppose you want to expand your company by 25% this year. Reexamine your vendors’ rates and request reductions based on larger orders.

Setting attainable targets is the key, after which it’s time to search for strategies to boost sales while cutting costs. It will significantly help you achieve or surpass your budgetary goals and maintain your company’s financial health.

6. Failing to update the budget

We know the significance of developing and maintaining a budget for your company. Periodic budget updates are another step in the assessment process. Your budget is flexible and should vary due to regular evaluations.

Let’s assume that although your budget was based on past pricing, the cost of your raw materials has increased by 5%. It now seems sensible to boost this expense’s future budgetary allocation by 5%.

For example, if market pressure causes you to decrease prices by 5% going forward, assess your sales income and determine if you want to reduce sales by 5% or boost unit sales by the same percentage.

The goal is to create transparent budgeting reports that fairly depict the state of your company.

7. Not distributing the funding to the necessary parties

Distributing your final budget to those who need to see it is the last stage in any successful budgeting process. It tells them what to expect and how to conduct themselves. Your company comprises several teams, each specialising in a specific field or industry. A copy of the budget outlining the expected income and costs for a particular vertical (such as operations, sales, marketing, etc.) should be made available to the team leaders or heads of that vertical.

The budget also establishes the annual spending caps for each team or vertical and the recipients of expenditure reports. It gives each team member the ability to actively monitor the financial allocation.

First, consider if everyone knows how much money they can spend and on what?

And second, is everyone familiar with the monthly spending report process?

If you cannot respond “yes” to both of these questions, you have not adequately disclosed the budget to your internal teams. Tracking and evaluating your budget’s efficacy will be challenging without total sharing.

Last but not least, you should pay attention to the messaging.

Grabbing your internal audience’s attention is vital when you convey the significance of monitoring and reporting on your budget.

Conclusion

The truth is that few business owners or founders take pleasure in developing financial plans and accounting systems. The development of spending plans is not the reason for their entry into the corporate world. But maintaining a business’s financial stability requires careful budgeting. Therefore, it is a positive start to be aware of which budgeting errors to avoid.

Overestimating sales, not using data to support the budget, not keeping track of your income and spending, and not planning for unforeseen costs are all big mistakes. Another thing to avoid is setting improbable goals and failing to update the budget or inform the necessary parties.

Making and maintaining a budget is necessary for company success and involves short-term discomfort in exchange for long-term gain.