As a small business looking to grow, controlling costs and forecasting
revenue is a very important practice. Watching your bottom line and reining
in your spending by creating a budget is a key element of cash flow management.
What is a budget?
A budget is a detailed statement of expected revenue and expenses. It should
include revenue from product sales, services, accounts receivable, and any
other revenue sources. Expenses will include costs such as rent, office
supplies, payroll, inventory, insurance, and other things that businesses
spend money on.
Budgets typically are based on fiscal years and then broken down by month or
quarter.
What is forecasting?
Forecasting future sales is a critical part of creating a budget.
Forecasting revenue is typically based on past performance and insight into
future revenue opportunities. If you track leads, opportunities, and pipelines
in a CRM tool, the CRM tool can provide very valuable metrics to help you
develop your forecasting.
If your business is new and with a little history, then you can perform your
own research and base your forecasting on similar businesses.
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Budget and Forecasting in Versa Cloud ERP
Versa Cloud ERP allows you to create budgets for your expense
accounts, and forecasting revenue for your income accounts. Let’s take a
look at how it works.
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Businesses generally budget and forecast in specific periods. Versa
Cloud ERP supports period types such as monthly, quarterly, and yearly.
You first choose the fiscal period (typically a fiscal year) and then choose
your budget periods: by month, by quarter, or by year. Then you select the
general ledger accounts to include in your budget. After the account is
selected, you enter the actual budget/forecast amount for each period/s. If
your budget is monthly, then you would enter a number for each month in the
fiscal year. Repeat this process until you have selected all the general
ledger accounts you want to track.
Most people create budgets and forecasts in a spreadsheet and would prefer
to create the initial numbers in spreadsheets. Versa Cloud ERP allows
users to download a spreadsheet as a template for inputting budgets and
forecasts. You can do all your number-crunching in a spreadsheet and then
upload the same file to Versa.
After all the numbers are loaded into the system, Versa gives a real-time report of actual vs budget/forecast. You can see up to date expenses and
revenue numbers and compare that to your budget and forecast. As it is
common to all Versa Cloud ERP reports, you can drill down from the
report into transactions details to see what you are spending on, and what
makes up your revenue numbers.
It is also important to periodically review your budget and forecasts to
make realistic adjustments based on performance to date.
With this tool on hand, Versa Cloud ERP helps businesses watch their
bottom line and top line. Because Versa runs in the cloud, your real-time budget and forecast vs actual information can be shared with your team
anywhere, anytime on any device. Isn’t that a beautiful thing?
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