Budgeting and Budgetary Control:

The next element of financial management is budgeting and budgetary control.  Budgeting is an integral part of the management accounting process, allowing organisations to project into the future using historical data.

Budgeting is generally short term with an accepted maximum of one year into the future (either financial or calendar). Budgeting however can be broken down into smaller increments to include quarterly, monthly, or even weekly budgets.  How far budgets are broken down depends on the organisation itself and its capacity to resource the bookkeeping and ongoing reporting requirements that short term budgets command.