Most business budgets are built once, in December, and never opened again. The problem is rarely the arithmetic. It is that the budget was built as a document rather than as a tool — a tidy set of projections nobody compares to reality, in a format that cannot answer the question an owner actually has in March.
A budget worth the effort does three things. It tells you what you expect to happen. It tells you what to do if that stops happening. And it tells you how much cash you can take out of the business without putting it at risk.
Here is how to build one.