Personal Essay

I have always believe that budgeting was always a necessary part of doing business and also running a home. Currently working part-time, having two kids, and trying to pursue my MBA, I have realized that having a budget is important but there needs to be room for mistakes and unexpected situations that can come up.

While being at home I can relate to want to do away with a budget but that won’t happen. It helps my family figure out what we can and can’t do. When I am at work I can tell you that we have goals that we need to get to each day but even those differ because if we don’t meet it that day then the owner doesn’t get upset with us because we didn’t meet that goal. As a company we understand that we need to make sure that people are getting everything that they need in order to finish a project or maybe start a new one if they had been thinking about that. We are there to help them. Most of the time we are not told about numbers but I talk about it with the owner because he knows that I got a degree in accounting and he likes that at least on other person knows what needs to happen during a time period.

Reading about how in 2005 Bogsnes and his senior leaders actually talked about why they have a budget was very interesting. Until now I have always thought that strict budgeting was the best solution for everything. However after reading this article I have found that my reasoning wasn’t correct. I believe now that the only reliable way to have a budget is to only budget the items or actions that don’t change all the time. (Banham, 2012)

When I am working on my budget at home I write down what I can expect from a paycheck and then I write down the expected amounts from bills. Then when the time get closer I can make a more accurate budget based on actual amounts from the paycheck and the actual amounts for the bills. Once I do this I have an actual budget that makes sense and it works. Of course, there is always going to be situations that come up that require money. In this situation I try to budget for this in each pay period. I believe that this is the only way a budget will really work. You can get rough budgets all you want to but things are going to change. As far as a company goes, they can have budgets for investors and managers as a guideline.