The essence of budgeting is the same whether you’re counting your allowance as a kid or managing millions at a huge corporation: it’s simply a method for keeping track of how much goes in, and how much comes out.

It’s an incredibly simple concept, isn’t it? So how have we managed to make budgeting so complicated? Sure, at a company there can be multiple sources of income, debts, and other pieces of the financial pie to take into account—but that doesn’t mean budgeting has to be the gargantuan task that it often is.

That’s actually why we came up with the True Sky budgeting software: to simplify the budgeting process while using a format, Excel, that everyone (ok, most people, at least) is very familiar with. We know we can’t take budgeting back to the carefree days of second grade, but we can at least help you turn your budget into something your mom would be proud of.

And on that note, here’s how True Sky can help you stick to the same budgeting rules your mom taught you years ago.

Keep track of your spending

At our house, this was budgeting rule number one. If you don’t know what you’re spending, you’re basically a ship lost at sea. With True Sky, we knew we wanted to make this easy for everyone to do, not just the CFO or manager who’s in charge of the budget.

We incorporated an easy set of permissions that allow you to set up access for whoever needs it, while maintaining transparency and complete accountability. This allows you to cut through the bureaucracy that so often surrounds the budgeting process—instead of having your employees give you sheets and sheets of expense reports at the end of the month, they can enter them into True Sky themselves. So the only spending you’ll need to worry about is the big picture spending—and your own expense reports, of course.

Review your budget regularly

Budgets don’t work if they’re planned out, then discarded and not looked at for the next six months. A successful budget is one that can be reviewed, changed, and updated as needed, to reflect the reality of what’s happening with your money. True Sky allows for easy monitoring and updating, and even allows you to project potential scenarios by changing variables.

Learn from your past mistakes—and successes.

Remember the year you really wanted that Strawberry Shortcake doll, but a split second decision to buy ice cream on your way to the toy store with your dad threw a wrench into things? You had to dust the whole living room to make up that lost money and get Strawberry into your tiny little hands.

And while it might be too much to say that you never allowed yourself to get distracted from your budget again, you most likely did learn something from that mistake. The same principles apply to your business budgets. Everyone, unfortunately, makes a mistake at some point in their career. We overestimate the success of a product and, therefore, the income it will bring in. Or we underestimate how much money it will take to bring it to market.

To really become a better business budgeter and move your organization forward, you need to be able to see those times when you screwed up, so you can learn from them. The same is true of your past successes—maybe you made an incredibly accurate forecast that allowed your team to save thousands of dollars. True Sky allows you to access old budgets easily, so you can use all the data possible to help you make better decisions in the future.

Do you want even more budgeting ideas? Read our e-book, Best Practices for Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting. And if you’re ready to give True Sky a try, contact us today!