The Operating Budget For The Virginia Department Of Transportation

The budget process is a powerful planning tool for government to make important resource decisions. According the Carney and Schoenfeld‘s article on How to read a Budget, an operating budget is a reflection of government’s financial plans. When a budget is

There are different types of budgeting that businesses typically use and those include Operating budgets, Capital Budgets and there are many subtypes that exist because a budget can also be created for special events, the recruitment and retention of new staff, and to manage the advertising expenses and return on investments for a business (Demand Media, 1999-2012). According to Demand Media (1999-2012), "An operating budget outlines the total operating expenses and income for the organization, typically for the period of a fiscal year. Capital budgets evaluate the investments and assets of the business, and a cash budget shows the predicted cash flow in and out of the business over a period of time” (para.2 ). According to the Cost-Benefit Analysis (2012), “Capital budgeting has at its core the tool of cost-benefit analysis; it merely extends the basic form into a multi-period analysis, with consideration of the time value of money. In this context, a new product, venture, or investment is evaluated on a start-to-finish basis, with care taken to capture all the impacts on the company, both cost and benefits. When these inputs and outputs are quantified by year, they can then be discounted to present value to determine the net present value of the opportunity at the time of the decision” ("Cost-Benefit Analysis," 2012).

This research paper is a brief discussion of budget management analysis. Budgeting is the key to financial management, and is the key to translates an organization goals or plan into money. Budgeting is a rough estimate of how much a company will need to get their work done, and provides the basis for evaluating performance, a source of motivation, coordinating business activities, a tool for management communication and instructions to employees. Without a budget an organization would be like a driver, driving blinded without instructions or any sense of direction, that’s how important a budget is to every organization and individual likewise (Clark, 2005).

In outlining a budget there are two phases that must be determined to create a budget, an operating phase and a financial phase. “Developing a new operating budget starts with examining budgets from previous years and identifying what components are going to change, by how much and if any new components need to be added or existing ones reduced or cut” (Budget Challenges, 2012). In the first phase of the budget it needs to be determined how much money is going to be needed to operate the day to day activities of the business.

Ineffective practices in creating and monitoring a budget include failure of management to integrate the operating budget with other planning efforts (Academic Writing Tips, 2011). Organizational leaders should ensure that the long term and intermediate goals correlate with the operating budget. Failure to align the operating budget with various assumptions such as size, scope, and nature of future operations can pose a problem (Academic Writing Tips, 2011). According to Finkler and Ward (2006), upper management and financial officers usually create the operating budget omitting frontline and unit managers. This process can lead to failure in the financial management practices

Budget is a planned outcome of the future - defined by your plan that your business wants to achieve.

A company's budget serves as a guideline in planning and committing costs in order to meet tactical and strategic goals. Tactical goals such as providing budgetary costs for daily operations, and strategic objectives that include R&D, production, marketing, and distribution are all part of the budgeting process. Serving as a guideline rather than being set in stone, the budget is a snapshot of manager's "best thinking at the time it is prepared." (Marshall, 2003, p.496) The budget is a method in which to reign-in discretionary spending, and will likely show variances between what costs have been anticipated and what costs are actually incurred.

Budgeting is the systematic method of allocating financial, physical, and human resources to achieve an organization’s strategic goals. Budgets are utilized by for-profit and non-profit organizations to monitor the progress towards the goals, assist in the control of spending, and help predict cash flow for the organization.

The operating budget requires prepreration of data from sales, production, manufacturing, selling expense, and general and administrative expense budgets. The budget varaiance is the difference between the budgeted amount of expense or revenue, and the actual amount. The budget variance should be used when the actual revenue is higher than the budget or when the actual expense is less than the budget.

Public transportation is serious need of a massive overhaul in this nation. We are in desperate need to catch up to the European standard of public transportation in this country. In Europe, citizens can travel across cities, bodies of water, and even counties with their state of the art public transportation system. Europeans are not nearly as reliant on cars and oil as the United States is because they have the much more practical option of taking the transportation provided to them by the government to where ever they need to go. They have set a model that the United States needs to strive for and meet in the near future.

Budget formulation and use are tools that guide many decision making strategies in business. The measures that are least effective could create an avalanche of catastrophic events that can negatively impact the decision making strategies. It is in the best interest of the pertinent parties to draft an operating budget based on a collective set of information relating to organizational vision and mission. Ineffective measures can be catastrophic based on the foundation for measures used in creating the budget. Among the many issues organizations face that relates to creating an effective operating budget results from poor

Budgeting is crucial in the well-being of a company especially the financial health status of a company. In fact, no professionally managed firm would fail to budget, since the budget establishes what is authorized, how to plan for purchasing contracts and hiring, and indicates how much financing is needed to support planned activity. It is routine for a company to budget for its expenses. Expense budgets act as a guideline of how much revenue a company would require keeping the activities running. It is used to set the company’s targets for a certain period.

“It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it” (George W. Busch 2005). This definition of a budget can be supplemented using the Oxford dictionary, which states that a budget is an estimate of income and expenditures for a set period of time. Nowadays almost every business uses budgets and managers use them as a tool in order to set targets. In other words managers can, with the use of budgets, explain in a financial way what are the

Budget is a comprehensive business plan for procuring and appropriating a firm’s financial resources over a specified time period.

Budget and budgetary control practices are undeniably indispensable as organizations routinely go about their business activities and operations. These organizations are constantly on the alert on how actual levels of performance agree with planned or budgeted performance. A budget expresses a plan in monetary terms. It is prepared and approved prior to a particular budgeted period and explicitly may show the income, expenditure and the capital to be employed by organizations in achieving their goals and objectives.