Making a statement
Since graduating from college, my professional life has pretty much hinged on my masterful ability to turn a phrase, my willingness to travel great distances in order to get to work, and my stunning good looks. How I am not yet CEO of Time-Warner, I'll never know.
Still, I've gone a long time without having to put together much of a full annual budget. That is, a complete profit and loss statement what with all the incomes and expenses and derivatives and denominators and parentheses for minus signs and whatnot. My budgets have all gone on a project by project basis, usually pooling together printing costs, mailing costs, and a list of suggested periodicals in which to place ads. I've rarely had to think about expenses like property insurance or utilities. Until now. Now, I'm putting together a budget for our whole operation, and it's a little daunting. Marketing is just a line item. One of a hundred.
It's funny, because I've always viewed the budget as a slimy, red-eyed monster that must be slain, and the only way to do it is to balance it at great personal sacrifice to you and the ones you love. Those expenses will always creep upward with your hackles and eventually the only thing you can do to sate its horrible appetite is to burn something you love in such a way that the flames flicker in the reflection of your tear-filled eyes.
Today, though, I noticed something else: it's a bunch of numbers. They don't hate you. They're just telling you what's been goin' on lately. Sometimes those numbers work against you. Sometimes they work for you. Sometimes, and this was the shocking thing, they do both at the same time. If, for example, you notice that every year your business has been in existence, you've spent about $800 on, say, colored pencils, and this year you've only spent $300, then you can think, "Hooray! Now I've got extra money to cover the unexpectedly high cost of shoelaces this year!" or you can think, "Oh no! How much more money are we going to have to spend when this drought of colored-pencils-spending comes back to bite us in the ass next year?" Or let's say you pay a fee per transaction on your credit card machine. You could try to cut that cost, and hope you don't do a lot of credit card sales, or you could hope that this will be the best sales year ever and raise that expense accordingly. That's some pretty thinky stuff.
For some of the items in the budget, I wanted to solve the problem the way I have traditionally. But no one cares if you write puns about net losses or try to rhyme "depreciation" with "a preachy Haitian." You just need the numbers to add up. I have to wonder if fresh-faced CPAs see a balance sheet and it makes their eyes light up and they're off in dreamworld. Does it inspire dreams of making the great American profit and loss page, a budget so balanced and beautiful that it's featured on the cover of business week? It's an odd concept to me, but interest has to be interesting to someone, right? (Pun!)
Anyway, it's been an eye-opening experience. I feel like I understand a lot more about the budget than I did when I started. And I don't feel lost in an incomprehensible fog whenever I look at the numbers for work. It's a very comprehensible fog now. And if I can get really good at creating and balancing a budget, then maybe I can master the other task that has stymied me since I started my job. Maybe I can finally tackle replacing burnt out fluorescent lights.
