Budget information in the Operational Plan may be organised in two different ways. Firstly, as the illustration below depicts, each strategy or task contained within the Operational Plan is allocated a budget, even if NIL. This budgetary information is most useful to key organisation personnel who will be responsible for the strategy/task.
Secondly, the Operational Plan may provide a summary income and expenditure budget as an appendix. Building a budget from the bottom up by considering each strategy and task to be performed is the basis for good Operational Planning and Budgeting. It is time consuming but it is the best process for ensuring that the Operational Plan is feasible from a financial point of view.
While each strategy/task should be costed as accurately as possible, there is always some element of guesswork. Nevertheless, it is good financial discipline to have a limit on spending for each strategy and to work out whether there is sufficient income to support the sum total of all strategies. If there is not enough income, then either some strategies/tasks have to be done more cheaply or not at all.
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