Budgeting and Forecasting
Financial statements tell you what already happened; budgets and forecasts are how a business reasons about what's going to happen — and that forward view is where finance stops being accounting and starts being strategy. A forecast is a model of the future you can steer by: it tells you when you'll run out of cash, whether a plan is affordable, and what happens if things go better or worse than hoped. For engineers, it's a familiar idea in unfamiliar clothes — building a model, running scenarios, and updating on new data.
Financial statements tell you what already happened; budgets and forecasts are how a business reasons about what's going to happen — and that forward view is where finance stops being accounting and starts being strategy. For engineers, it's a familiar idea in unfamiliar clothes: building a model, running scenarios, updating on new data.