Sales Budgeting Overview

A sales budget is a detailed schedule that shows the sales revenues your company expects to generate over the next year. You can survey past and potential future customers, monitor sales trends of previous years, and conduct market research to assist you determining future sales trends.

Sales Budget Development

To develop a sales budget, you need to estimate how many units of a product you expect to sell each month, taking into account seasonal or periodic fluctuations to arrive at a more accurate overall picture. Once you have determined the number of units, convert this into a dollar figure. Remember to consider inflation rates when you calculate this amount. After you have arrived at a figure, determine the expenses you expect to incur in earning that income so that you can determine how much profit you can anticipate receiving.

Budget Group Creation

Use the Sales Budgeting application to assist you in developing, maintaining, and analyzing your budget. You can base your sales budgets on specific products, or create groups of similar products and budget based on those groups.

Budget Entry

After you have created the budget group and assigned various related products or price lines to it, you can then begin the process of assigning monthly and yearly sales estimates to the products or budget groups broken down by customer. If your sales fluctuate by the season or during specific periods, you can create default monthly percentages by customer or for your company as a whole.

Budget Analysis

After you have created your sales budget, you can then monitor your actual sales against the amounts you have budgeted. If sales are by far exceeding or not meeting your budget figures, if you have authorization, you can adjust the budget up or down, as needed. The system provides a budget analysis report to assist you in determining how well you are meeting projections. If, after a year, you are comfortable with how your company is performing compared to the budget, you can copy last year's budget over for the new year and adjust next year's projections to meet the new inflation rates.