QuickBooks® 2012 For Dummies®, UK Edition

Chapter 13

Building the Perfect Budget

In This Chapter

Checking out powerful tips for business budgets

Setting up and adjusting a budget

Forecasting your profits and losses

Projecting your cash flows

We don’t think that a budget amounts to financial handcuffs, and neither should you. After all, a budget is just a plan that outlines how you intend to generate sales, how you should spend your money and how you can best organise your firm’s financial affairs.

Is This a Game You Want to Play?

If you created a good, workable chart of accounts (discussed in Chapter 3), you’re halfway to a good, solid budget. (In fact, for 99 out of 100 businesses, the only step left is to specify how much you earn in each income account and how much you spend in each expense account.)

Does every business need a budget? No, of course not. Maybe you have a simple financial plan that you can monitor some other way. Maybe in your business, you make money so effortlessly that you don’t need to plan your income and outgoings. Maybe Elvis Presley really is still alive and living somewhere in Alaska.

For everyone ...