An interesting question don’t you think? In other companies I’ve worked for, it was “kind of” assumed that as a manager got promoted and accepted more responsibility, so that responsibility included the departmental budget. Now I for one, don’t believe that anyone can grasp any company or departmental budget without understanding their own domestic budget – in simple terms, if you can’t manage your own money, how are you going to manage ours?
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It has a certain ring to it doesn’t it? (if you can’t manage your own money etc…). And, when you consider that a failure to manage cash, or spending too much are two of the many reasons that such a large swath of companies go bust, you might well wonder how well the principles of those companies could manage their own money, let alone that of their company!
A Great Example…
Always one for an anecdote; I recall wanting to pass more authority to a couple of people in my last business and as part of that I decided to teach them how to create and manage a small domestic budget (before they got their grubby hands on mine that is), after which I would introduce the company budget and induct them in the knowledge they had a basic understanding. Actual values didn’t matter I told them, we just need to include net income, then costs like mortgage, council tax, power etc – it can be fictitious, but you need to understand the principles.
The next challenge was when one member of the team said they didn’t want to and “they’d never been very good at maths” and the other said they didn’t want to look at domestic budgets, however fictitious and could we go straight to the company accounts.
Now here’s the question: Should I take that to mean my training was dreadful, or was I going to promote the wrong people?
Need Help with Budgeting?
If you’re new to domestic budgeting, try Money Saving Expert’s Free Excel Budget Planner available to download at www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/Budget-planning#tools. It’s quite detailed (as it should be) but will really help you to see where you’re money goes each week/month and how you can ensure you don’t spend more than you earn.
There’s also budgeting forum at http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?p=7602297 where you can ask questions. Who know’s maybe Martin will even answer!
Image courtesy of lincolnblues
