Since the lifeblood of any business is its ability to collect cash and pay bills including the pay checks of its employees, it is important to prepare a forecast of its cash requirements whether for a new or ongoing business. All businesses need to have an idea of future income and costs. This is best tackled by preparing some form of a budget as well as a forecast. For those who don t have training or a background in finances, you may be at a disadvantage as you sit around the management table without any knowledge in budgeting process. Budgeting is the process of identifying, gathering, summarizing and communicating financial and non-financial information about your future activities. The money allotted for it should only be enough to buy a cheap but nutritious and delicious meal. Here are further budgeting tips that can prevent you from acting like you haven t eaten for decades, and grab almost everything you find edible from the grocery racks. You need to have in mind two things in choosing what to buy: the price and the nutrition content. Another way to find out where your money goes is to collect all your receipts and credit card bills from the past few months. In this way you will keep track of your spending and think twice next time on purchasing on an impulse. To those who think you know where your money goes without detailed records, keeping track of every cent you spend for one month will tell you otherwise. Lunches, coffee, parking ticket, beers, movies and the like are hard to remember unless you write them down as soon as they are incurred. As you go on with your budgeting, you can add more categories. Modification is constant for spending is not only limited to your regular expenditures. Irregular expenses include travel, gifts and charity, among others. This means that what has been already spent is not automatically sanctioned. Past expenditures may serve as guide to but not to justify for future outlays. Traditional budgeting versus zero base budgeting This is actually a new technique of planning and decision-making. It ultimately reverses the working process of traditional budgeting.