Have you heard people say that in order to grow your finances you need to start budgeting? They go ahead to tell you to start saving, work on what to spend on, what you keep, what you think will be petty cash around you, all these sorts of things going on in their motivational talk to help you grow your incomes.

I want to first deviate from their ideology, let me start like this “if you don’t know how to do record keeping, you can’t budget and you can’t save”. I have a mechanic friend who always wanted to grow his garage, he kept asking me to recommend people for his service which I did. But he never saw anything growing in the business.

Later as we were sharing, I told him to do a simple record keeping book for the services he is doing in the business, I asked whether he knows the number of cars coming in everyday in the garage and he had no clue about it. He told me days are different and customers differ in commitment, which everyone struggling in their business gives as an excuse for not keeping record. But last year when he started record keeping, his business started blossoming, he has good growth, and customers trust him because he has records and evidences of his transactions.

As terrible as rain that comes early in the morning are you are waking up for work is he who keeps running business without keeping records, you will surely come down like vapor and disappear in space like air, and be delayed to do the things you need to do in life. Don’t let your business or finances grow small, don’t assume you know your records in the head, keeping track of your transactions helps you manage your liquidity.

So start today, find out how much money you are spending on food, water, transport, airtime, and data among others. Make a weekly deliberate effort to write all your expenses. First ignore the budget for now, spend and record, after one week, find out how much money you will have spent on the different items, analyse your expenses visa vie your incomes.

It is until you learn to keep records that you can begin to budget, you will realize that now that you know how your expenses are going, you can limit your outflow of money? This is the best way to budget; record keeping is the foundation of budgeting and saving money.

By Julius Oboth

#TrainUpInstituteInternational #Business Administration