Budgeting Management

My process of writing these three essays on budgeting management was most helpful to me, I believe, in the sense that it actually helped clarify the various processes about which I wrote, providing me greater conceptual awareness of budget management planning, processes, and content. Of the essays I completed, I must admit that I like various parts of all of them, but feel that my third essay was the best. By then I was more confident about what I was writing. Overall, what I learned from writing all three essays, an insight that will, I believe, remain with me long after this course, is that one learns a great deal more about a subject from writing about it.

My third essay was the best-focused of the three, and most detailed and specific. It was the end result of much thinking I had done. My best sentence, within that essay was (I feel): “The top management, working with the financial department, will need to establish which projects bring highest added-value to the company and to spend the company’s budget on those alone”. Writing that sentence helped me write the remainder of the essay, and then to rewrite everything before and after it. I also felt a special connection to the type of essay that this third essay was (“persuasion”), since, while learning and writing about this material, I was persuading and being persuaded (i.e., educated) about “the importance of the planning function in the overall budgeting activity and will be arguing for the many ways the budgeting planning function is coordinating with the company’s strategic planning”.

However, another good sentence I wrote was the first sentence of my first essay: “Budgeting is one of the fundamental concepts in managing a business and it is often up to the budgeting policies that the managers decides upon that will conclude if the company is going to make it in the industry or not.” This sentence also helped me to clarify, in my own mind, the importance of the topic I was writing about, and guided the rest of my thinking, through it and the other two essays.

With these essays as background, I feel that I was able to write a good research paper, especially since I had learned, from previous writing processes, about not only structure, but key functions of a research paper: to present a thesis statement based on careful thought and inquiry, and then to defend that thesis statement with facts and research. Most writing concepts introduced in the course were not new to me, although applying those concepts, within the particular context of materials at hand, was new. One important writing concept I was able to apply within these essays was synthesis. In my third essay, the final two sentences, I believe, synthesize my argument: “You cannot have a successful planning or organizing within a company without correlating these with the budgeting function, in order to obtain the realistic backup of any project.

Budgeting and planning go, in this sense, hand in hand, and you cannot really have one without the other in the company.”

One other process that helped me a great deal (although at the time, I did not particularly care for it), was writing and rewriting multiple drafts, a process I do not often experience in other courses. Not only did writing multiple drafts help make my papers better mechanically, grammatically, and in terms of “hard thinking”, but it also gave me more confidence that I could really write well. I think, though, that my grammar still needs a little improvement, and in places, my punctuation does too. Overall, though, I sincerely feel that I have given my writing for the course my best effort. I suppose one can always try a little harder, but in my case, one could not try too much harder than I have tried this term. I gave the course, and my writing, my best efforts, not so much for the grade (although grades are important to me), but rather, because I really wanted to learn the material. Writing was integral to my learning.

Moreover, my family knows I have given this course, and my writing, my best effort, because they have witnessed first-hand all the time and effort I have put in, and all the thought (often aloud) that I have given the subject matter for this course. In all of those respects, then, I am very proud of the work I have done in this course during the term. I focused on it; I endeavored to learn all I could; and I aimed to do work of a quality I could both be proud of and learn from in the future.