Have A Plan - Budgeting For Seasonal Crafting Income
December 4th, 2008

Budgeting for your seasonal craft income can be tricky when you first start, but it is profitable for your business's well being. Working out both short and long term financial budgeting for your business can let you know when you are on track. It will help keep you in control of your business finances and change things when they need to be. Here we will go through some tips on what and how to budget for your financial plan for the next year or so.

What you budget:

When it comes to budgeting you should consider not only your income and expenses but also a balance summary so you can get a clearer picture of your business. Getting a complete summary of your craft business will help if you need to buy unexpected equipment or if you would like to add new products in the future. Another thing you will need to budget is your cash flow; it will help show you how purchases and expenses affect your money. Estimating your cash flow can be done through both your income and balance statements.

How you budget:

When you first start up your craft business, you will have to budget by estimating your sales and expenses making sure to include even the tiniest of items. It does sound a bit daunting to make a budget for something when you don't know the exact outcome, because it is a new business but you can adjust as you go.

While you are in this start up phase you should do your financial budget once a month for the first year so you have a more detailed summary for future years. From the beginning of this first year you need to establish your money level for each category. The exact amount is important as this will distinguish and calculate your profits, as well as your operating expenses, receivable accounts and your inventory levels you need. To find out the total of what you have sold you will need to calculate how much it costs to produce the item, it's usually done through percentages.

The next thing you will need to work out is your operating expenses, payable and receivable accounts and your inventory levels. You can work out your operating expenses by taking all of your expenses into account such as insurance, marketing, advertising, materials and other related fees and working them out with the current business taxes. You can work out accounts payable and receivable as well as your inventory by taking the amount of days into account.

You should write down all of your findings on your balance sheet so you can work out the rest of your assets and liabilities. To work them out you should also do them by categories.

You continue to repeat this process every month for at least the first year of your craft business's life to create a consistent and accurate budget. When you increase your plan into a seasonal one you will notice that your budget and cash flow will start to vary with different seasons. If your business is one that takes in higher amounts of sales through the period leading up to and through the Christmas months, you should consider adjusting your plan. You can do this easily; the method of working out your budget is as follows: income budget, balance sheet then cash flow. This is because you need to know your net income before preparing anything else because of profit numbers and retained earnings.

There are many ways you can making your financial budgeting easier. There are many software programs on the market that was created for this reason. Some of the top selling ones are Win fast and Quicken.

If you have any problems or concerns when you are trying to work out your budget you should seek advice from a certified public accountant. It is advisable to let them help you through it for the first few times so you know that you understand the whole budgeting process. Once you get a hang of recording an affective financial seasonal budget you will gain many benefits. You will know that you will always be on top of your craft business and know where your financial levels are always and can change them if need be

---

Please use the form below to comment on this page:

Name:
Email Address:	(kept private)
Comments:
Let me know if my message is replied to:	yes
Please enter the digits 513 in the box. This keeps away spam robots:

PHP Warning: Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\Program Files\HSphere\3rdparty\PHP\PHP5\ext\php_curl.dll' - The specified module could not be found. in Unknown on line 0 PHP Warning: Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\Program Files\HSphere\3rdparty\PHP\PHP5\ext\php_gd2.dll' - The specified module could not be found. in Unknown on line 0 PHP Warning: Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\Program Files\HSphere\3rdparty\PHP\PHP5\ext\php_mysql.dll' - The specified module could not be found. in Unknown on line 0