Jacksonville CPA | Budget Vs Forecast
Good morning, my name is Brandon Mack Roy and I’m the president of Mineva and uh, just want to chat today about budgeting and forecasting, so as not a topic that, uh, you’ll hear from a Jacksonville CPA, there’ll be a few but um, give me a call and we will help you out with all of your financial and tax needs.
But today let’s talk about the difference between a budget and forecast. So a budget is basically telling your money where to go rather than wondering where it went as Dave Ramsey says. And a forecast is basically creating a plan for the future and then holding yourself accountable to that plan.
Um, so there’s different opinions. Budgets are great too to get your, uh, finances. Okay, track. I’m Greg crabtree says a budget is a license to spin. The forecast is your roadmap to profitability. He says skip the budget and learned to forecast. So, um, what I would recommend is to do both. So you know, you’re always going to have a profit on your forecast, right? Problem is if you don’t follow through on what you said you do, then you will make a profit obviously. So if you’re Jacksonville CPA is not helping you forecast or budget, then you need to come to them Neva. So to make forecasts work, they have to go hand in hand with execution.
So, so many times when I speak to business owners out here that they, they need a budget and you need a business model and a forecast you are willing to act on so you know, but it is good to have a, a, um, atomization of your expenses and to know exactly what your costs are each month, your hard costs, your variable costs. So I have a budget budgets. Here’s what Greg, Greg crabtree says, budgets are essentially a license to spend and they’re not a roadmap to making money in there. You can’t be flexible when it comes to changing business conditions. Yeah, I can have a, a budget for my mortgage payment because that doesn’t change, but you can’t really have a budget for office supplies because I should only buy office supplies when I need them. If you budget a number, you’ll have to make someone, the office supplies a Barney fife. Someone would have to make sure that you buy supplies are paper there, did percent cheaper. I mean, you know, again, you can’t cut your, your bathroom supplies enough to make you profitable. You know, I’ve seen people who, you know, when they go through tough times, say start counting the cookies that the staff are consuming in the conference room, you know, that’s not sending the right message about your organization. Don’t want to be wasteful. So if you see someone taking advantage of, you know, the conference room supplies and you know, it’s a teachable moment to either coach them up higher or to introduce them to the world wide labor force.
But um, you know, you know, you want to be looking forward. So budgeting is also, is always going to. You can have you keep your head down, okay? You’re going to be looking at what happened and you want to be thinking, looking at numbers and thinking about what you want to make happen. Okay?
So you know, there’s so many customer companies out there that display this very well and if you have a Jacksonville CPA that you’re not happy with, give me a call. So, you know, I’ve seen it for a successful company forecast for the entire year. So you need to draw up a forecast for the year, but uh, you need to update them each month as actual results become known and better information is available. Okay? So you, you need to project that out month to month basis. So you have a forecast for the rest of the year. Okay. So, so many people, they, they, they draw up a plan at beginning of the year, we expect to do that year, you know, here’s the revenue, who’s expenses, here’s where I’m going to make in profits and here’s what I’m going to do with the extra money. When a plane is done, it goes into a drawer and you know, they may look at it once a quarter or maybe not at all. So this,
you know, you have to find out what have you actually done to this point and what are you going to make happen for the rest of the year. Okay? Have to start realizing realizing that you don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. Okay? But, uh, you’re much more in the flow of things because you’re constantly looking at what happened and what’s going to happen. Okay? So if you have a Jacksonville CPA that you’re tired of the come to Mineva. Okay? So once you start getting into the flow of things and looking at what’s happened, what’s going to happen, you start to get a sense of the momentum of your business and where it’s going to take you. Okay? You have to understand there are certain things you can’t change right away
and uh, certain things that you can, but it’s just a slow effort to change the things that you need in your business. So, you know, it may sound like a lot of work, but you don’t have to feel it filling in every detail,
okay? P and l on your balance or your balance sheet. Just keep it simple and answer questions such as, you know, what’s my revenue, what’s my cost of goods sold, what’s my labor, what are my operating expenses? When you get the data at those levels, you’ll see that the numbers don’t move around as much as you thought they would. Okay, so we’ll continue this on the next segment. But, uh, you have a Jacksonville CPA that you’re not happy with of Mineva. Call.