Module 5
Budgets, targets and management accounts: planning the year and watching it
A budget is a plan expressed in numbers, and management accounts are the monthly report on how the plan is going. Many small firms have neither: the owners know roughly how busy they are and look at the bank balance. That is enough in a good year and dangerous in a bad one. A budget forces choices to be made on paper before they are made in a crisis: how many hours can the team really bill, what will they collect, what will they spend, what must be earned. The management accounts show, month by month, where reality departs from the plan, early enough to act. This module teaches how to build a budget from the bottom up, how to set targets that people can influence, which handful of measures to watch, how to read the monthly accounts and what to do about a variance.
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See what is included in All-Access →General education on law-firm finance, using invented firms and figures. It is not accounting, tax, financial or legal advice. Rules on accounting, tax, client money, insurance and fees differ between countries and change: take advice from a qualified accountant and check your regulator’s current rules.
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