The end of the year is always a busy time at the office. There are projects to wrap up, client contacts to make before the holidays hit, corporate holiday cards to send – and, not least of all these, business budgets to handle. At True Sky, we’re always preaching our business budgeting tips to simplify your life.

There are several things to consider when it comes to closing out your budget, and your year, in December. To help you close out your budget at the end of the year, consider implementing these year-end budgeting tips:

Use it or lose it

Depending on how your business works, you may have excess dollars your department needs to spend if you haven’t fulfilled your budget for the year. This “use it or lose it” approach can create additional stress for department heads – you don’t want to waste money, naturally, but you don’t want your budget for next year to be cut.

There are, however, some smart and easy ways you can put those dollars to work.

1. Pre-pay for maintenance on your software systems. If you generally need a few hours of maintenance for your CRM, financial systems, or other software, consider buying a chunk of a CFO consultant’s time now, to use next year. This way, if something major suddenly comes up, you won’t have to take any “emergency funds” out of your current budget.
2. Show your gratitude to your team. What better time for giving than the holiday season? Consider using those extra budget dollars to show your employees how much you appreciate their hard work. Starbucks giftcards, movie passes, a catered lunch for your team – the gift doesn’t have to be big to have a big impact on morale.
3. Invest in some training for yourself or your team. This is another service that you can pay for in advance, without having to take advantage of the training right away. Training is often one of those items that gets cut from a budget. Over time, that can really affect a department’s productivity. At True Sky, we offer regular webinars throughout the year on our Excel interface-based budgeting software – try scheduling your team for one!

Review your year

The end of the year tends to be a time that inspires reflection. December is a great time to reflect on your business’s yearly performance – did your budget need lots of revisions throughout the year, or was it fairly accurate from the first? Did certain departments outperform their previous year? Did your projections come to fruition? If not, what factors might have influenced that outcome?

Another important thing to tackle as December moves along is your tax situation. As soon as you can, get an idea of how much you’ll owe so you can begin to reconcile that number with the estimated tax payments you’ve been making. Whether you’ve been overpaying or underpaying, you’ll need time to make all the numbers work out.

Review your software and systems

If you’ve been unhappy with how any of your software or systems have served you over the past year, December is a great time to look at making a switch for the new year.

If you’re considering revamping your budgeting systems, the most important first step to take – if you haven’t already taken it – is to get feedback from your employees. How do they like the current software? Are there particular functions that waste their time? Are there functions they’d like, but don’t have access to?

You may already have a good handle on how your employees feel about the systems your business uses if they’ve been vocal about it throughout the year. Usually, of course, we all have much more to say about things that frustrate us than things that are running quite smoothly!

But if you don’t really know how the current software is serving your employees, take the time for a quick meeting to gather their feedback. You could even send out an email requesting short responses, if time for a meeting is not in the cards.

If you find that your budgeting software is not working well for your employees, consider looking into True Sky. We designed True Sky as a kind of antidote to the cumbersome, complicated, difficult-to-learn budgeting software that so many businesses have had to use. True Sky is flexible, familiar, and usable by everyone – not just the people in your finance department. You can learn more about True Sky’s features on our overview page.

We hope these tips help you greet the end of the year with a clear mind and happy heart. Happy holidays!