AMSPAR

Diploma In Primary Care Management

Unit 602

Financial Management And Budgeting
In a
Primary Care And Health Environment

By

Graham Morrison

Task 1 1a. Evaluate the information and processes required to be able to set a budget, which supports the organisation's business goals. Discuss how you would use them to prepare, formulate and monitor a budget. The objectives of budget preparation are shown in the table below. Objective | Comment | Planning | Compelling managers to plan is probably the most important feature of a budgetary planning and control system. Planning forces management to look ahead, to set out detailed plans for achieving targets for each department and operation and ideally each manager and to anticipate problems. It thus prevents management relying on ad-hoc or uncoordinated planning which may be detrimental to the performance of the organisation. It also helps managers to foresee potential threats or opportunities, so that they make take action now to avoid or minimise the effects or threats and to take full advantage of the opportunities. | Responsibility | Objectives are set for the organisation as a whole, and for individual departments and operations within the organisation. Quantified expressions of these objectives are then drawn up as targets to be achieved within the timescale of the budget plan. Budgetary planning and control systems require that managers of budget centres are made responsible for the achievement of budget targets for the operations under their personal control. | Integration and Co-ordination | The activities of different departments or sub-units of the organisation need to be coordinated to ensure maximum integration of effort towards common goals. This