Understanding Budgeting and Forecasting Basics

Sooner or later, almost everyone in a company is handed a budget: a sales head with a revenue target, an HR manager with a headcount plan, an L&D lead with a training spend, a founder with eighteen months of runway. Very few are ever taught what the numbers mean. This course fixes that, without assuming any finance background. You learn what a budget is and how it differs from a forecast, a plan and a target. You learn the building blocks every budget is made of: revenue, fixed and variable costs, capex and opex, and why profit and cash are not the same thing. You then follow how Indian companies actually build budgets across the April to March financial year, from top-down and bottom-up approaches to zero-based budgeting, drivers, assumptions and monthly phasing around Diwali and year-end. The second half covers forecasting: simple methods like run rate and moving averages, rolling forecasts and a first look at cash forecasting. You finish by learning to read a budget vs actual report, manage your own department's numbers, budget for people and spot the budget games that quietly destroy trust.