Starting & Running a Business All-in-One For Dummies, 4th Edition (UK)

Chapter 4

Budgeting for Beginners

IN THIS CHAPTER

Building a budget

Looking at alternatives

Calculating capital budgets

Clutch, a market research firm, carried out an interesting piece of their own research in 2021, updating it on 15 April 2022. They found three interesting facts:

• Half of small businesses don’t have budget.
• The smallest businesses are the least likely to have a budget.
• Businesses that make a budget usually deliver on it.

(https://clutch.co/accounting/resources/why-small-businesses-need-budgets)

An unpleasant truism in business, and in much else, is that after resources are allocated, they become misallocated over time. Another way of looking at this problem is to say that just because something ‘ain’t broke’, it doesn’t mean you can’t make it perform better still. For your business to grow and keep growing, you need to make a continuous effort to improve every aspect of the business.

One surefire way to get poor performance back on track – or, better still, to turn satisfactory results into exceptional ones – is to set specific goals to make that happen. Sure, you have a long-term business plan that looks out to the distant horizon (refer to Chapter 4 in Book ...