Budgeting – Finalize Decisively!

Last week I talked about when you have a good final draft step away.   If you missed that post, you can review it HERE.  This week’s topic is Finalize Decisively.  You can fine tune your numbers to the point where you lose focus on the big picture and your goals. Over working the details will not make your budget match reality perfectly.

There is a fine line between excellence and perfection.  Excellence is the quality of being first class.  It speaks of doing things the right way, doing them very well.  Perfection is the state of being without fault or defect.  It speaks of doing and redoing things to the point where there is no flaw left. 

When I think of things that need to be done perfectly, I think of the mirror on the Hubble space telescope.  The tolerances required to make the mirror in that telescope work were minute.  If it was going to work right, it needed to be perfect.  If you know the story around that mirror, it wasn’t perfect.  Due to a calibration error in the test equipment they were using to manufacture it, the mirror was off by one-50^th the thickness of a human hair.  That error created a spherical aberration, which resulted in Hubble being out of focus.  That is not a very big error, but because it was not PERFECT, it didn’t work right. 

Now the way that they fixed Hubble was an example of an excellent solution.  The perfect solution would have been to replace the flawed mirror with a perfect mirror.  But because they did not find the flaw in the mirror until Hubble was in space, replacing the mirror would have been incredibly difficult and expensive.  Instead of requiring that Hubble have a perfect mirror, NASA came up with a different solution.  Rather than replacing the mirrors, they added an instrument package that worked the same way a pair of glasses does, correcting the focus problem that the spherical aberration created.  Being excellent was much better than being perfect. 

There is nothing wrong with being perfect in areas that require perfection.  If you are building precision instruments with very small tolerances, go for perfect.  A budget doesn’t require that kind of precision.  Over working the details will not make your budget match reality perfectly, because a budget by nature is an estimate. You can't predict the future perfectly, it hasn't happened yet. You also don't know what major events will affect the economy, for good or bad, thus affecting your business.

You can fine tune your numbers to the point where you can lose focus on the big picture and your goals.  Don’t worry if your numbers are perfect, I can pretty much guarantee that they won’t be.  Be diligent about your research.  Do a first class job with your budget.  Spend enough time to do this and no more.  Make your best estimates and be done!

If you know someone this post will help, please share it with them!  Then scroll down to the comments section and leave me a comment on this post.  If you aren’t already a subscriber, sign up for notification emails and other promotions!  Have a great week!