Page 109 - Budgeting for Managers

6

Checking It

Twice

He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice.
—J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie
istakes are easy to make and hard to find. They last a long
Mtime if we don’t catch them. (In fact, in researching the line
from “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” above, we found that it’s
attributed not only to Haven but also to Henry. That is a mistake
that has been passed around to dozens of places.) We should do
our best to eliminate mistakes, big and small, from our budget. If
we understand where errors come from, we can establish meth-
ods that prevent errors or catch them before it’s too late.

Using a Partner for Proofreading
No matter how good a job we think we can do, we all make mis-
takes. Even computer programmers, who work to be as precise as
they can, create one new error for every five they fix. Worse, when
we read what we wrote, we tend to see what we think we wrote,
and not what’s actually there. We need to have others check what
we do. See the sidebars for two approaches (and a caution).

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