As a business owner, you have a lot of responsibilities on your plate. From supervising your employees to paying attention to your budget, there are many things you’ll need to handle to be successful in your chosen industry. One thing that can fall by the wayside when it comes to budgeting is property maintenance and repairs, especially if the business owner doesn’t work on the site that needs the repairs. When it comes to property repairs, here are four tips for ensuring they stay within your budget.
Start with Creating A Maintenance Schedule
To first get your budget in order, you need to create a maintenance schedule. This schedule will include everything from your roof to the siding of the building. It’s important to note that you’ll have on-going maintenance fees for things such as pressure washing the siding and complete repair costs for when it’s time to replace all of the siding. You should have a chart setup with each maintenance task and how often it needs to be performed.
Figure Out Costs for Maintenance Tasks
Now, you should have a clearly laid-out list of all the maintenance tasks that you need completed. Next, it’s time to figure out the cost of those tasks. You can usually get these costs by either speaking with an expert in the field or looking online. Make sure that you’re clear about the real cost of items on your list. For example, shingle repair may only run you a few hundred dollars, but a roof replacement can run you tens of thousands of dollars. Try to be as accurate as possible with your pricing, as accuracy will allow you to be best prepared for maintenance expenses when they do arise.
Get Accurate Monthly Costs
To figure out an accurate monthly budget, you’ll need to determine your monthly maintenance costs. This will be achieved by dividing the total cost of the maintenance tasks by the number of months each task will need to be done. So, let’s say you have pressure washing your siding on your maintenance task list and it costs $600 every three months. You’ll take that $600 and divide it by three months to get your monthly expected cost. In this case, you would need to save $200 per month to afford that $600 pressure washing expense every three months.
Add Up the Numbers
Now, since you have the monthly cost for each maintenance task on your list, it’s time to add up the numbers. This will give you the total amount of expected maintenance fees you’ll need to save up for on any given month. Take the total number that you came up with as your monthly expenses and multiply it by 1.10. This will give you an additional 10 percent emergency fund for costs that you may not have thought about.
Determining how to budget for business property repairs isn’t too difficult to do when you have the right strategy. The above steps followed in order will provide you with a decent estimate for what you should be putting aside each month for your property repairs. It may take a bit of time to come up with the list and prices, but you’ll thank yourself later when you don’t have to think about it later.
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