ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the budget monitoring process extends beyond the passive activity of observing and analysing budget progress. Monitoring emphasises a systematic approach. It provides a bridge which links planning, profiling and setting a budget to the potential need to intervene and gain control of a particular position. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of developing this monitoring feature is the rationalisation of decision packages within the money time framework. Although these packages, by their very nature, will in the interim exceed resources available, they must in the final analysis be made to equal expenditure and budget. In order to gain control of the spending cycle it is necessary to keep a record of the various stages through which a financial episode will pass. It is also important that budgets are managed in such a way that controlled events which can result from an inability to plan are reduced to manageable proportions.
