Page 33 - Budgeting for Managers

Budgeting for Managers
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ber and explain all your ideas later if you need to.
This document is brief but clear. Not all items are explained,
only the most important ones, that is, the ones that changed
most or the ones that were based on new rules. Yet this is
enough information to make it easy to evaluate and improve
your budget throughout the year and to make it even easier to
prepare a budget next year.
Step 7: Checking Your Work
You are almost ready to present your budget. But you are prob-
ably a bit nervous—and you should be! You don’t want to have
someone else find your mistakes after you’ve delivered your
budget. So, the best thing is to find those mistakes now and
have someone else help you do it.
You need to do more than check your numbers.
Capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and grammar are also
important. And it never hurts to take a few extra minutes to
make a document look good with stylish, professional fonts and
formatting. Chapter 6 will guide you through checking your
work and Chapter 7 will show you how to make a professional
budget presentation.

Learn from the Old-Timers
Most of us may not remember when budgets were done by
hand. In those days, mistakes were a lot harder to find.And,
strangely enough, there were fewer of them. Having computers makes
things so easy that, sometimes, we become lazy or sloppy.
My mother used to project student enrollment for every school in
Philadelphia.A co-worker would help her proofread tables by reading
every number aloud from the original while she checked the new ver-
sion. It was a lot of work, but it led to award-winning results.
It’s very hard to catch our own errors.We tend to see what we
think we wrote.We assume that our spreadsheets are working the
way we want them to and we miss errors created by bad formulas.To
prevent this, work with a partner. Have someone unfamiliar with your
work read it aloud while you verify it. If no one on your team is avail-
able, help another manager with his or her budget in return for getting
help with yours.