Annual Budget Monitoring, Evaluation & Reporting
Answers
Certainly not monthly. Either quarterly or semiannually, depending on the volatility of circumstances affecting the budget. If necessary you might consider developing a process for addressing individual line items when the need arises to avoid overall scheduled reviews, or at least make them less frequent. Reviews are time consuming and should not be scheduled without good business reasons.
That depends on the software solution you use to plan, budget and analyze. With the right solution, analyzing actual results (as reported by
If you have a software solution that allows you to forecast the balance sheet (derived from beginning balances plus forecast activities in each budget period), you will be able to forecast the financial health of your organization (think “future period” balance sheets) and have pre-set future period financial ratios, formulas used in loan covenants, etc.
You will be able to quickly see what the actual balance sheet and its derived financial ratios, etc. are doing vs. your forecast. Doing this monthly (although the accuracy of the actual data may not be as good as quarterly data) will allow you to closely monitor the financial health and performance of your organization and enable you to react quicker to developing trends and anomalies.