Tips On Budgeting & Maximizing Cash & Time

I thought you might enjoy this transcript of a coaching conversation about the importance of having a budget cash flow spreadsheet.

Please note that this is also about budgeting and maximizing time as this transcription was type set by Deanne McAndrews, our Virtual Assistant and I proofed and posted this blog while doing cardio.

Simon: Please give me an update on the budget cash flow document that you are working on.

Client: The budget cash flow form, I go to it every couple of days and I start fiddling with it and populating it a bit here and there but I’ve got to sit down, there are things in it that I’d like to change so I’ve made a date with myself for Friday to work on that.

Simon: They say life is a journey, it’s not a destination and I think a budget cash flow document is the same thing. It’s never ever finished and we’ve got to be able to keep working at it to get it refined. You just do your best the first time you create one and then go to work creating income and then revisit the budget cash flow in 30 days when you have income to add and measure, you can tweak the expenses at that time also.

Client: The budget cash flow document has me looking at my books to look at how much should I spend here, what did I do there, what do I expect to have here for income. Because it’s technical and it’s not a fun thing to do, it’s kind of like doing homework, you don’t want to but you have to. It does help you understand your business a lot better, that is one thing that I did take away from that, just from playing with it. That’s a key component to why I believe I feel a lot more confident than I ever have before.

Simon: When you first start thinking about or looking at the budget cash flow document, the fear based ego mind plays tricks telling you stories that there’s not going to be enough and you’re not going to make it and it’s going to be difficult. The ego is saying … No, we’re too busy, we don’t have time for this right now, there must be something else to do. You’ve got to go out and sell something to survive another day. Not creating a budget cash flow document doing is an avoidance strategy. By not doing it then we run a pattern of; there’s not enough and I have to work hard to survive, and it’s complete scarcity. Doing the budget cash flow is a right of passage towards emotional and financial security. For without it, we remain unsafe and stuck in survival.

Client: It’s because there’s that big question mark always there. It’s that big uncertainty. It’s like that junk drawer that you don’t want to open and start sorting through. It’s like, I don’t want to do this, so you just keep it closed and you forget about it. And then it comes back. It keeps reminding you in the back of your mind. Every time you’re spending for the business or personally you think, will I able to afford this and so on. Am I running on the wrong path here? By working on it, it gives you clarity. The first time you look at the budget cash flow you don’t want to do it because the ego has you convinced that you will be in the red. Then you do the work and you say to yourself, it’s not as bad as I thought it was. Or, look, it’s actually really good. Things are better than I thought they were. It gives you a definite picture.

Client: I’ve done a budget cash flow in the past in it just created more scary. Every year the managers would talk about business plans and you’re going to sell this much. What they never taught you was go back and measure what you’ve done in the past to help you move forward. Or, look at what areas need improvement. The budget cash flow helps you do that. What I find is I see where I’ve been and where I was at a certain point in the year because you’ve got all the months there. You see where your strongest months are. It’s measurement. It’s a visual picture of something that’s abstract. If you put it down on one sheet then you see, okay, this is where we’re at.

Simon: You’re going back and you’re looking at the expenses and so you’re getting clear on what they actually are versus an absence of understanding. When there’s an absence of understanding then there’s judgment. When you’re going forward and you want to be able to make a personal or a business expenditure… There are 2 things going on there. One, is that I don’t feel comfortable making this investment. The biggest part of it all is that I haven’t been tracking what my income is. I have not been celebrating what my income is along the way. A budget cash flow is not so much about the ending balance. It’s more to do with celebrating the income that one is creating and in the absence of the budget cash flow, there is no celebration … Only fear.