A budget is an essential tool for managing your finances. It helps you track your expenses and financial goals like saving, debt repayment and retirement planning. It also includes a plan to achieve those goals.
You can use budgeting apps, software programs or even a simple notebook and pen. Whichever method you choose, it is important to review your budget on a regular basis.
Cost management
Whether you’re building an office or renovating your home, the cost of materials and labor is often the most costly aspect of any project. That’s why it’s important to have a plan in place for managing costs and preventing overruns. Cost management in budgeting is a process that includes planning, estimating, monitoring, and controlling expenses throughout the life cycle of the project.
The first step in the process is identifying all the resources needed to complete the project, including personnel, money, equipment, and facilities. Then, you can estimate the total cost of each resource and set a budget for the project. This will help you avoid overruns and improve the profitability of your projects.
The final step is assessing the performance of the project against its budget and forecasting future costs. This is done using earned value management and adjusting the budget as necessary. The result is a successful project on time and within budget.
Estimation
A budget estimate is a rough order of magnitude for the amount of money needed to complete a project within its scope. It’s a key element in the development of a more detailed project budget and is used to gain approval from stakeholders.
It’s important to use data from previous projects when creating a budget estimate. However, this assumes that the project is similar enough to be comparable and that the team has access to relevant performance data. It’s also important to account for time buffers and overheads, as described by Futur’s Chris Do.
A top-down approach to estimating is best for smaller projects and can be faster and cheaper than bottom-up estimating. It entails breaking down the project into components and assigning them costs, which are then tallied to create a total cost estimate. This method is considered the most accurate but can be time-consuming. It’s often used in combination with a three-point estimation technique, which compares the most likely cost, best case, and worst-case estimates to find an average value.
Scheduling
When planning a budget, it is essential to have accurate schedules and cost estimates. Without this information, managers cannot accurately measure the progress of their projects and track their costs. Using scheduling software will help you avoid many of the pitfalls that are common in project management.
The first step in the budgeting process is determining what activities are necessary to meet the project objectives. Then, you can assign resources and time scales to the individual activities. This will give you a high-level schedule for the entire project.
It is also important to consider the amount of float in each task. You want a lot of float to allow for changes, but you don’t want to have too much float, as this can lead to scheduling problems. It is also crucial to identify the critical path, which is a method for finding tasks that must be completed first. You can use software to find the critical path for you.
Monitoring
Monitoring is a critical aspect of budget management. It enables a school to track the actual expenditure and income for a given period against the planned budget and identifies over- and underspends. It also helps to prevent errors and fraud. It also promotes accountability to those who have provided project resources and to communities that are served by the project.
The budget monitoring report, also known as the budget versus actual (BVA) report or the budget variance report, is a comparison of a planned budget with the actual financial transactions of a project or department. It identifies the differences between the two and highlights any over or underspends, highlighting why they occurred.
Finance staff should prepare budget monitoring reports regularly throughout a project, typically once per month. Programme staff should review these reports immediately after they are produced and, where significant variations exist, take action to resolve them.