Cassie Peay

Accounting 2020
April 7th, 2021
The Master Budget Reflection

The Excel Master Budget Project was relevant to my future career in many ways. I plan
to open my own business and I would like to be able to review my own budgets at any given
time. I would especially like to know where I stand financially, in general, without frequently
needing a CPA or other professional to help me. My plan is to open an afterschool music
program for youth. With those future goals in mind, this assignment gave me an opportunity to
view a real-life scenario of what we’ve been learning in class. I enjoyed seeing objectives from
our homework and quizzes put into an actual business budget spreadsheet. This project gave
me an idea of what my own business’ monthly costs and expenditures might look like. I will be
paying employee wages, buying instruments and musical equipment, and keeping up with
monthly utilities. When my business gets going, I will absolutely implement a policy of having a
minimum ending cash balance every month. I had never thought of that prior to our most
recent chapter.
This assignment challenged me in that I had to be very detail-oriented while inputting
the numbers and formulas. I also had to find certain costs using equations, and I had to apply
multiple lessons into one project. I am very particular with Excel and I am constantly double-
checking every cell and every equation for accuracy, so it was time-consuming for me to enter
all the data precisely with so many variables and steps. It was also tricky because the step-by-
step videos used different numbers and percentages, so I really had to stay focused and not
deviate from the data we were given to work with. I was tested when it came to some of the
concepts we learned in previous chapters, like the Direct Labor Cost Per Unit and the Income
Statement. I followed along very closely with the step-by-step videos to make sure I was
recalling older concepts correctly. I also feel that this spreadsheet, along with Module 9, used
so many different budgets that it was taxing to remember what columns or rows should be
summed vertically or horizontally, as well as which budgets used starting numbers for the
quarter, and which used ending numbers for the quarter.
What I learned from this project is that so many different factors go into
successfully running a company every month. This spreadsheet gave me an actual look at how
many elements affect each other as well as the financial outcome of production and sales. I
would be able to use something like this Excel layout for my business, but it would be geared
towards a service firm instead of a manufacturing firm. I believe the purpose of this assignment
was to show us, not only how many components go into a monthly and quarterly budget, but
how important it is to properly allocate costs, labor, and expenses. This was an opportunity for
me to see that if one factor changes somewhere along the way, it may end up making a
substantial difference in a company’s income and how one needs to collect payments. I also
learned how convenient and necessary it may be to have a line of credit available to your
business to maintain a minimum monthly balance. This project was thoroughly challenging yet
satisfying to complete.