Hello, young managers! Are you wondering how to master finances, budget and advance your career? This article is for you.
Why Is Building a Budget Essential for You?
In the article « Finance: Your Key Partner in Budgeting Success, » we saw why a budget is crucial. Now, let’s focus on how you can do it concretely. Whether you’re in a large company or a small structure, financial management is a key skill that will set you apart.
But, What is a Budget?
A budget is a financial plan that details the income and expenses expected over a given period. It serves as a roadmap for managing resources and helps achieve specific financial goals.
Here, we are interested in your group’s operational budget: It details the income and expenses related to the daily activities of the company or department. It includes salaries, raw material costs, operating expenses, etc.
Learning First and Foremost
Making a budget and forgetting about it won’t help you. You need to:
- Establish your budget with precision. It’s the planning: A budget is, first and foremost, a planning tool. It forces you to think about your goals, your available resources, and how you are going to use them.
- Track your expenses regularly. It’s the control: A budget allows you to control costs and ensure they remain aligned with your goals. It provides a framework for tracking performance and identifying discrepancies.
- Do validation check-ins to see where you are in relation to your forecasts.
- Communicate with other groups: The budgetary process often involves communication between different stakeholders (teams, departments, management). It fosters transparency and alignment of goals.
And even if your company doesn’t ask for it, you must do it to master your execution as a group leader. Not being within the budget envelope is a key performance indicator for your group and also a risk-leading indicator for upcoming projects because if you are over budget on one project, there is a very high probability that you will start other projects late.
The Fundamentals of Estimation and Tracking – Essential Tips for Building Your Budget
- Look at the previous year’s budget and the amount actually spent, and take the time to understand the reasons for the discrepancies: hiring, illness, project delays, someone who was replaced by a junior person, an estimation error, etc.
- Compare your new budget with the previous year’s and understand why the amount is different compared to the prior year’s actuals. You’re not doing this to defend or justify your budget; you must do this to understand and rationalize your decisions. Without this analysis, you won’t be well-equipped to understand the discrepancies during the year and to explain them.
- In Quebec, a person works approximately 1864 hours per year (taking into account vacations, holidays, and weekends). If you assign a person 40 hours per week on all projects, they won’t have time for training, team meetings, etc. Aim for an allocation rate of 80-85% instead.
- Estimate the costs of travel, training, and conferences. Training is strategic; help your employees develop their training plans and allocate a balanced budget between this investment and achieving the team’s goals. Get into this habit from your first management positions, it will help you throughout your career. Each element of the budget must bring value to the company and the people.
From your team’s workload plan, you will have the number of hours, resource needs, full-time employees, contractors, and interns. You can refer to the article From Annual Planning to Weekly Wins: Mastering Time Management
Creating and Reviewing Your Workload Plan
- Avoid excessively breaking down activities, as this reduces efficiency. Support your team members by limiting the number of parallel projects and promoting sequential work. A good practice is to have a maximum of two or three simultaneous projects per person, with one major project and the others in support.
- Validate the overall time estimates. By breaking down tasks too much, you put overestimation on all lines, and you don’t empower your teams; you are micromanaging. The most effective way is to estimate in blocks and adjust according to experience. What I learned by myself is very well explained and theorized by the Project Management Institute (PMI): block estimation and progressive adjustment are more accurate than overly detailed estimations (PMI, ‘A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide),’ 2017).
- Be realistic with your employees: unattainable deadlines will demotivate them. These estimations must be discussed openly, stimulating emulation and personal development. My experience as a designer taught me this. Between my first and third years of work, my execution times were simply no longer comparable. With time, the dexterity in handling tools and the business knowledge grew; that’s what we call experience. Measuring this progression and giving realistic goals greatly helps everyone’s development. Measuring this progression is motivating if it is done in a climate of trust and with open communication.
- Understand the cost of an acceleration or the cost of putting a project on hold and, therefore, the cost of restarting the activity. Thus, during strategy and planning discussions, you can bring factual elements that will allow you to understand the impacts of decisions. You can propose alternatives to limit the impacts as long as your proposals remain in accordance with the ethics of your role and the protection of your employees’ mental health.
Tracking Your Budget
- Learn to do regular tracking, to find solutions to balance, to be able to prevent overruns in advance. When you spend too much time on one project, it means you will delay other projects, and this can have an effect on different groups who are waiting for your analyses or « inputs. » The beauty of a company is this interdependence between groups. Not having the data on time to do your analysis and make the decision impacts those who need this as input for their contribution to the execution of a project.
In Conclusion
This learning block is the foundation for the future. It is by practicing, predicting, tracking, and understanding the discrepancies that you will improve in your forecasts. Peter Drucker, a pioneer of modern management, summarizes this in a simple and effective phrase: « What gets measured gets managed. »
The second benefit is that you will enable and accelerate your employee’s growth by helping them quantify their progress.
And So, Your Role as a Group/Section Leader
As a group leader, you are responsible for:
- Delivering projects on time and within budget.
- Managing the training, conferences, and travel of your team.
- Closely tracking the costs of your projects.
Practical Tips:
- Use a spreadsheet (Excel, Google Sheets) to track your expenses and your budget. See in tools: budget creation
- Set up regular meetings with your team to discuss expenses and necessary adjustments.
- Don’t be shy about asking questions to the finance department. They are there to help you!
Continuous Development and Progression
It is by practicing, predicting, tracking, and understanding the discrepancies that you will improve in your forecasts that you will learn to grow the skills of your employees by helping them quantify their progress. As a manager, you want your group to be recognized for its quality of delivering on time, without defects, and within budget. Your role is to help put in place this discipline that allows you to be a reliable partner in execution. This will enable you to learn and thus become more and more reliable.
Future Prospects and Evolution
Financial management is an essential skill that will help you progress. Don’t get discouraged if you make mistakes at the beginning. The important thing is to learn, to improve, and to become an increasingly reliable financial manager. In an upcoming article, I will present the lessons learned in budget management when you take on a larger group.
r discover others?
🛠️ Three simple actions to master your budget
Build your hour budget in blocks, not micro‑tasks
To estimate:
use work blocks,
adjust based on the experience of the contributors,
discuss and validate the estimates with the team.
You avoid micromanagement, empower your employees, and gain accuracy.
Plan your team’s real capacity (not the theoretical one)
Apply this rule systematically:
1 employee = 80–85% real capacity, never 100%.
This prevents cascading delays, invisible overloads,
and projects starting late due to lack of availability.
You become a reliable manager because your forecasts are realistic.
Perform an “hour‑budget autopsy” of the previous year
Before building your budget, analyze the gaps between planned and actual,
identify their causes (illness, departures, project delays, poor estimates, unforeseen events…),
This step alone already improves your budget accuracy by 20 to 30%.
It’s the foundation of all progress.
👉 These three simple actions strengthen your leadership posture and unlock your potential.