How to make accurate predictions of income

If you are a business owner who is trying to plan a budget you might be looking for a way to accurately predict your income. Or you might be thinking about expanding your business and would like to find out if the it will be worth it, honestly who wants to expand their business if they are not going to increase their overall profit? No matter the reasons making predictions of your income is not an exact science, which means there is no sure fire way of getting the right numbers. Your only way to figure this is to look at your historical data or in the case of a new business what you think your business is able to do and make an estimate of sales and expenses to figure your net income.

Here are some basic questions that you will need to answer to help make accurate predictions of your business income.

- How much can you realistically sell next year?
- How much will you charge for your goods or services?
- How much will it cost to make your product?
- How much will you have to spend for operating expenses?
- Will you have to hire any employees? If you do how much are you going to pay them? And how many employees will you be hiring?
- If you have employees will they be working part-time or full-time or both? If both how many will be working part-time and how many will be working full-time? You also want to think about what you consider full-time hours and part-time hours.
- How much will you pay yourself?
- Do you need to borrow money for your business? If so how much are your monthly loan amounts going to be?
- Will you be providing employee benefits, such as sick days, health insurance, 401(k), etc?
- How much of the market do you or will you have? Basically this is determining how many customers you think you will receive each year.

By figuring out the answers to these questions you will be able to accurately predict your income for your business for the following year, just remember that this is not an exact amount so your figures might be off by a lot or by a little. If your business has already been established you should gather your old records and use the numbers from your old financial statements to help figure what your new predictions will be. When you are estimating what your future earnings and expenses might be you should be conservative, do not use huge numbers that you have no hopes of reaching.

If you plan on expanding your business you can think about how many sales you had last year at a certain store and then make an estimate on the number of sales you will have at the new store by using around the same numbers of customers at your old store or even going about ten percent lower. This can help you to determine more accurately the amount of sales you will have. After figuring the amount of sales you will need to know your expenses, if your stores are selling the same items and the costs have not changed you can get a more accurate estimate of your expenses which will give you an even more accurate estimate of your income. If you do not have any historical data because you are a new business owner you should try looking at what other businesses in your industry have done in the past few years, this will at least give you some idea of what you can expect.