A budget may be asked to forecast the business, authorize spending and judge a manager. Those purposes can become tangled. A number that helps plan resources may be a poor target to defend after the circumstances change.
Our first selection is Infinite Upside for the obligations and timing behind a financial plan. Budgeting Basics and Beyond offers a budgeting reference. Beyond Budgeting questions the annual target-based management model. Choose the part of the financial-planning discussion you need to understand.
Infinite Upside: putting the operation behind the plan
By Vijay Sheth.
Chapter 6 describes changing an acquired business while it still has customers and obligations. Vehicles take time to sell; premises and staffing commitments change on different schedules. Savings do not all become available at the moment the owner decides to pursue them.
Later, Chapter 12 keeps maintenance, staffing, debt and reserves in view before money is treated as available for a new purpose. An appealing next investment has to meet an operation with existing claims on its resources.
Start here if the financial plan is mostly a total while the work and timing behind it remain vague. The memoir's situations give the reader a reason to connect a proposed financial change with what has to happen in the business.
These are owner decisions to examine, rather than a budgeting course. A reader wanting techniques or a critique of a formal management system has a different next step in the books below.
Budgeting Basics and Beyond: studying the budgeting work
By Jae K. Shim, Joel G. Siegel and Allison I. Shim.
Wiley's fourth-edition overview describes a reference for financial and nonfinancial managers, with subjects including rolling forecasts, variance analysis, financial modeling and capital budgeting. The selected edition carries a 2012 copyright.
Investigate this direction when you want to study the practice before deciding whether your company needs to change its approach. A reader may need to understand the purpose of a comparison before arguing about its result.
Imagine a fictional service company whose managers receive one budget report but use it for different questions. One wants to plan the coming workload; another wants to explain the period just completed. The reader wants a reference for studying those financial-planning and control subjects. This is an editorial example, not a case from the book.
Its breadth suits reference-based study more than a short argument about management philosophy. The age matters especially for the software and technology material. Choose it for the budgeting subjects you need to understand, rather than a claim that its listed applications are current.
Beyond Budgeting: questioning fixed annual targets
By Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser.
The publisher's description of the 2003 Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free from the Annual Performance Trap criticizes traditional annual budgeting tied to fixed targets and performance incentives, and presents an alternative management model.
Choose Hope and Fraser when the management system itself is the question. Perhaps the fictional company can produce the calculations, yet managers are more occupied defending targets than discussing what has changed.
That is a reason to investigate a critique. It is not evidence that abandoning the current budget would solve the company's difficulty. The reading concerns how an organization is managed, not simply whether a spreadsheet should have another column.
This has a different purpose from the reference beside it. Read the argument in its historical and organizational setting, then ask which part of your own system you actually need to understand. Forecasting, spending authority and accountability still require arrangements, whichever approach the company studies.
Choose what the budget is for
Bring one question to the reading: what work does this financial plan need to support? That question can lead toward a technical reference or toward the management argument.
The flexible-budget explanation works through a specific comparison. The measurement selection concerns what a chosen number can and cannot represent.
Read Infinite Upside for an owner's account that keeps resource plans attached to obligations and operating changes. Try the opening passage before continuing into the later financial choices.
Read alongside the book
Chapter 6, Buying a Business That Was Losing; Chapter 12, What Ownership Pays For.
Original commentary and discussion material. Read the full personal accounts in Infinite Upside: Building Wealth With Room to Live, by Vijay Sheth.
Choose an edition
Choose an edition