Enhancing Your Business Budget

Every successful business needs a budget

It’s a basic tenet of business – before you can make money you have to figure out how to spend it. Drafting a budget is a key way to help you turn your dreams for business success into reality. Using this vital tool, you can track cash on hand, business expenses, and how much revenue you need to keep your business growing – or at least afloat. By committing these numbers to paper, your chances of succeeding with your business are helped by anticipating future needs, spending, profits, and cash flow. It also may let you spot problems before they mushroom so that you can switch gears.

Purpose and perception– the purpose of healthcare professional education is to educate learners to a high standard and keep them up to date – not to make a profit. Hence, while budgeting is important, you should always remember that it is a means of achieving an end and not a goal in itself.

Get involved –The earlier that you get involved in budgetary planning, the more likely you will be able to influence outcomes. Planning will involve deciding upon strategic goals, reviewing options, and deciding upon the best one.

Thorough communication between teams –The budget must be able to capture this complexity and must be communicated to the team in a format that they will understand.

Adherence –If there is going to be an over- or under-spend of the budget, then the time to know about it is as soon as possible. A small over-spend on say simulation equipment in the first quarter may turn into a massive over-spend by the end of the financial year. Corrective action taken into the first quarter may well be effective; action taken in the last quarter is unlikely to have much effect. The difference between actual spend and planned spend is called the variance. 

Consider Cutting Costs in Non-traditional Areas

Salaries and benefits come from one side of the budget while capital expenditures come from another. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. When you consider where to find the money for the increase in health insurance, keep all options on the table. Do you need all the space you rent now? Could you save money by allowing staff members to telecommute? Could travel be replaced with video conferencing in most cases? Look at everything, keeping in mind that your people are the most important aspect of your business.

-Henry Cabrera Anesthesiologist