Identifying the holes in your budget
One experience that all business owners go through from time to time is discovering that there is an accidental hole in their budget somewhere. Often, this is evidenced primarily by the fact that money seems to be disappearing, but it is not always clear exactly where or why that is happening. If you have started to suspect that your own budget might have some problems, then you’ll need to know how you can best identify those holes, and work out how to cover them up in future. Let’s look at some of the common culprits you might want to look out for.

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Reactive IT support
One of the most common causes of a budget hole in any business is the IT not quite working in the way it should. When this happens, it is often going to affect every other part of the business too, so it is something that you are going to want to think about if you are keen to fix it. A particularly contentious issue is when you are using a reactive form of IT support, which waits for problems to arise before fixing them. This is much less economically viable than being proactive and patching up problems before they become bigger, which is what you should be aiming for instead.
Shrink
Of course, sometimes it is not technically the budget that is at fault, but something else. When there are losses that you can’t account for, that is what we know as shrink, and while you might not be able to identify it clearly, there are some common culprits that you can look at. Generally, it comes down to theft and poor recording of stock, so make sure you are securing all your warehouses with roller shutters and surveillance cameras and take a look at your stock recording to see whether it might need improvement.
Outdated contracts
If you are operating in a B2B fashion, you need to always keep a very close eye on your contracts, as these are likely to signify that there might be something wrong going on. At the very least, you need to make sure that all contracts are kept up to date, and it’s generally best to review them once every month or so, if possible. At the very least, do a quarterly check to ensure that they are not just causing your company more trouble than they are worth. You might be able to patch up a significant hole this way.

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Smaller supplies
Your budget needs to be very clear and precise on every single thing you spend even a penny on. If there are any small supplies that you are not accounting for, then these are going to add up and cause the balance sheets to be unbalanced. It doesn’t matter whether it’s paperclips or post-it notes, you still need to inventorize everything and make sure that it is all accounted for. As long as you do that, your budget is going to be much more secure.