Mental Health Accounting Insights
Empowering Your Practice with Financial Clarity and Expertise
Mastering Financial Management with Mental Health Accounting
At Mental Health Accounting, we recognize that maintaining a budget for mental health group practices can be challenging, especially amidst the complexities of recent years like COVID, supply chain issues, and inflation. Our mission is to simplify this process for you, enabling you to focus on delivering top-notch care to your clients. Leveraging the power of QuickBooks, we offer expert bookkeeping services that are custom-tailored to support the unique financial needs of your practice.
Budgeting Made Simple and Effective
Differentiate Essential and Non-Essential Expenses
Prioritize necessary expenses in your budget, adding non-essentials only after covering your practice's crucial costs.
Utilize Historical Data
Prioritize necessary expenses in your budget, adding non-essentials only after covering your practice's crucial costs.
Sales Cycle Consideration
Whether your practice experiences seasonal variations or not, understanding the flow of your sales is crucial for effective budgeting.
Simplicity is Key
Start with a broad approach, avoiding excessive detail that could lead to complexity and inefficiency.
Emergency Fund
Just as personal finances require a safety net, so does your practice.
Team Involvement
Engage your staff in the budgeting process for diverse insights and a comprehensive approach.
Plan for Overestimation
It's better to overestimate costs than to find yourself short in key areas.
Debt Management
Use any surplus funds to reduce debts, starting with high-interest liabilities.
Supplier Review
Regularly assess your suppliers to ensure cost-efficiency.
Regular Budget Reviews
Monthly analysis and short-term budgeting can make the process more manageable and less daunting.
Your Virtual Accounting Partner
QuickBooks is a robust tool that simplifies the budget creation and adjustment process. It allows for easy entry and modification of budget amounts, ensuring your estimates are accurate and reflective of your practice's needs. At Mental Health Accounting, we help you navigate QuickBooks' budgeting tools, from setting up and entering monthly budget amounts to adjusting them as needed.
Building Your Framework
Let’s look at QuickBooks’ budgeting tools. Open the Company menu and click Planning & Budgeting | Set Up Budget. The Budget field in the upper left should default to the next fiscal year (Profit & Loss by Account). Click Create New Budget in the upper right. Change the year if you need to, then click Next. Leave no additional criteria selected and click Next.
Make sure Create budget from scratch is selected on the new page, then click Finish. Your empty budget will open, containing income and expense types taken from your Chart of Accounts, like Insurance Expense, Office Supplies, and Meals and Entertainment. The only way to modify those categories is by changing your Chart of Accounts, which you should only do with professional supervision. We’d be happy to help with that.
Now comes the hard part. You’ll have to start estimating your monthly budget amounts and entering them in QuickBooks’ budget template. The software offers two tools to help with this. If you anticipate the costs to be the same every month, like your internet access charges, enter that number in the first column, then click Copy Across. That number will appear in every box.
If you want to have QuickBooks increase or decrease the number every month, click Adjust Row Amounts and indicate your preference in the small window that opens.
When you’re finished working on your budget, click Save.
Continuous Budget Evaluation
With QuickBooks, tracking your budget performance is straightforward, thanks to its insightful reports like Budget Overview, Budget vs Actual, and more. These tools are invaluable for identifying and addressing any discrepancies in your budget.
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