Budgeting Your Projects

Part 2 of my series of articles on 'Making Money' has been published on Opera's developer site. (You may recall Part 1, Pricing your work.) Entitled, Budgeting Your Projects, this article focuses on some of the key ideas, concepts and issues freelancers and contractors will face when managing the financial side of the business.

What is Budgeting?
Broadly speaking, budgeting is the process of estimating the effort and resources required to execute a given task. When people speak of ‘budgeting’, they almost always refer to financial budgeting—budgeting money, and that’s what this article focuses on. Once you work on larger teams, or for an employer, budgeting is usually handled by a resource separate from the production talent—such as a project manager or account manager. But, when you work for yourself, you do the budgeting. And if you don’t, then no one does! Unless you are an employee, or you are working on a pure time and materials contract, budgeting should be a part of your standard workflow. The budget is the financial plan for a project and to ensure profitability, you must author your budget comprehensively, and maintain it diligently throughout the project. Failing to establish, manage, update, enforce and utilize your budgets mean that, odds are, your project will not be profitable. Thus, the difference between taking this process seriously and not is the difference between a profitable and unprofitable project—making money!

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-r