You are lost.e in the forecast of a project? Do you want to follow your budget more efficiently? Visual management is for you! Whether you are a team leader, in charge.Project worker, freelancer or simply looking for a way to better manage your expenses, this working method is there to make your life easier.

Why manage a budget via visual management?

As we have already mentioned, focusing on visual tools can save you a lot of time and mental load.The progress and follow-up of various stages are thus more easily identifiable and understandable to the eye.When you work in a team, it is also an opportunity to communicate more simply, without superfluity and by appealing to everyone's visual memory.e

In the context of budget management, it's more or less the same thing.The idea is to simplify the understanding of a history and a forecast at a glance.Are we making money? Are we losing any? Had the periods of expenditure and cash receipts been correctly identified? What are the fixed costs, or can we save?

With visual management, everything is easier to do your accounts! By materializing this data on a support, you will be able to carry out a quick piloting, correct your errors along the way or better analyze what worked or not.

This also makes it possible to view expenses or changes over a year and to plan cash inflows or outflows.Thus, you will be able to approach the year more serenely, whether at the financial level ("do I have enough to invest" or "should I be careful with my future expenses") or human resources ("such and such a service has been sufficiently profitable this year, why not hire an additional person?”).

In short, managing your budget thanks to visual management means saving time and being quickly reactive in the event of problems in order to continuously improve and project yourself.

Step 1: Determine the budget to manage (What?)

The main idea is simple: condense and simplify major financial events to quickly analyze whether you are profitable or loss-making.

For this, you can choose what type of budget you want to manage:

• a budget for a particular project (launch of a range, creation of a product or a site),
• a more global budget (for an activity, for example, a service, an item of expenditure or a division),
• or more simply his company's cash inflows and outflows.

Obviously, the more variables there are, the more it will be necessary to find a way to make your board easier to read.

Step 2: choose your exercise duration (When?)

Per day, per week, per quarter or per month, it is important to choose your monitoring filter carefully, which will then determine the shape of your table.

In a professional environment, we mainly talk about quarter or accounting year, in order to pass on late billing and payment.The idea is to have your financial follow-up on paper or a note sheet then to take stock of each month that has passed to transcribe it on your table.

Step 3: configure your monitoring plan (How?)

You can opt for a visual version, but detailed.

• Take a white wall and divide it into 12 columns or boxes using masking tape, corresponding to each month.To these columns, you can add rows if you want to manage several expense items at the same time.The main thing is that it remains readable.

• At the same time, take a note card and record the inflows and outflows of money each month.As part of an activity/project subject to seasonality or high and low periods, choose coloured sheets to easily identify them: blue sheets for winter and yellow for summer by example, you will be able to have a better idea of ​​the beginning and end of the seasonal periods for your activity.To keep track of “volatile” expenses (receipts, invoices) on a regular basis, store them in an organizer with dividers.You will be able to sort your receipts by type of expenses, weeks, etc.and identify them more easily.
• At the end of the completed month, perform a balance to find out if you were profitable or not. Then pin your card in the box of the corresponding month and categorize it according to its break-even point, thanks to a visual code like stickers, a marker symbol or even magnets multicolored.Green magnet, profitable month, yellow, balanced and red, loss-making for example!

By taking a step back, you will be able to obtain the overall status of your budget monitoring thanks to this simple and organized visual methodology.

Thus, as part of a professional project follow-up, the whole team has a global vision of the financial health of the project.This collaborative behavior will avoid many questions and may even boost the proactivity and motivation of your team.

Managing your budget with visual management: the tools

Do you want to get into visual management to better manage your projects or your finances? Foglietto offers you essential kits and tools to get you started:

• the “Kanban Method” kit to personalize your wall,
• customizable cards according to your desires or needs,
• or our mini-tutorials to push your different follow-ups even further.

You will thus be able to embark on materialized and effective budget management! For even more choices and stationery tools, head to our online store.And to learn more about visual management, follow the Foglietto guide.