If you’re a business, you know that at the end of the year, you have a significant number of things you need to get done. You start thinking about organizing documents for taxes, wrapping up your books, enrolling employees in any benefits programs they might qualify for, selling specific investments, and establishing a budget for next year.

If you list is pretty long or one item in particular seems daunting, it might be that you procrastinate, which is unpleasant. One of the most daunting tasks business owners face in the tasks they have to do is establishing their budgets. In fact, so many are determined to put it off that they’ve done just about everything to avoid it.

Here are some of the more common excuses, as well as the reasons they just don’t fly:

Excuse 1: Budgets are too confining; I can’t stick with my initial estimates for 12 months. It doesn’t make sense to create a budget and then disregard it, but here’s news: your budget is yours. You don’t file it with the IRS, you’re not legally bound by its contents and you (hopefully) didn’t make a pinky-swear promise to adhere to it with unwavering exactness. By some estimates, almost 80% of companies that create budgets don’t change them even once during the fiscal year. That’s not how things work in real life. You can and should change your budget as circumstances require. Budgeting for a shorter timeframe, such as quarterly, might even be a viable option for you.

Excuse 2: I won’t be able to react as flexibly to an unforeseen crisis if I have a budget in place. The reality is that companies that create budgets tend to be more flexible and more proactive than companies without budgets. When you’re actively tracking your progress toward a specific goal you can tell much earlier on if you’ve hit a snag. You can react while the situation is smaller and more manageable, and sometimes you can even see a problem before it occurs.

Excuse 3: Budgeting is too complex and takes too much time. While this might actually be true for some companies, it doesn’t have to be so. It’s true that many companies sweat extensively over their budgets; some even devote as much as 20% of their management’s time to creating those budgets. It’s true that a certain amount of detail is going to be necessary if the budget will be effective. However, the budget itself can often be quite simple. In addition, the time you invest in this type of planning will never be wasted, because you’ll save yourself time down the road when you need to react in the moment for split-second decisions that must be made.

Excuse 4: My industry is in flux and ever changing, so I can’t commit to a budget. In fact, every industry is in flux at every moment. Your industry is the same as every other, and you need a budget regardless. Of course, you can’t predict unknown events, such as if gas prices will rise, whether laws will be passed that will impact your profit margin, or whether you’ll need to hire new staff, but you can still use a budget to plan and set goals over the long haul. For this, you need to plan to take action at given times, which is under your control. You need to be able to look at your business with a critical eye and decide what you want to achieve in the next 12 months. If you can’t do that, then it’s time to sit down and figure out why that’s true.

Excuse 5: Budgets are meaningless. Everyone just fudges the numbers to paint a pretty picture of how things ought to look. Creating a budget that is based on too-lofty goals, hoping it will provide the inspiration to achieve them, is a sure-fire way to set yourself up for failure and frustration. One internet post compared budgets to pornography: “a fantasy about how the author would like the world to look, having no relation to the realities of the world, designed to titillate, stimulate and motivate the reader, but ultimately resulting in a sense of alienation and despair.” Long-term, that’s of no use. When it comes to budgets, you can and should keep it real.

Excuse 6: I have a budget, it’s just in my head not on paper. Keeping mental note of your company’s projects, numbers and expenses is overambitious. You may be able to do it for a while, but eventually your business reaches a size that makes it impossible for you to keep in touch with all of the details. If you have managers and employees working for you, it also prevents them from taking on some of the ownership and accountability for results with you. Even if you don’t feel like you’re big enough for a budget right now you will be one day. It’s never too early to start a good habit.

Remember that in reality, a budget is just a plan. It makes you step out of your everyday business view and forces you to look at the big picture strategically, so that you have to take note of where you are now and plan for where you want to go. Without a formal plan to help inspire you to action, planning a budget will likely be pushed to the back burner as you spend all of your time managing daily fires to be put out.

So what’s your excuse? Did your dog eat your budget? Do you need to vacuum your overstuffed sofa so that you won’t have time today? Did your mother-in-law coming to visit from Idaho? Or are you ready to stop making excuses, sit down and get to work?

Tags: Business

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