These are fundamentally two different things.
You may want a budget of what income and expenditure, marketing and capital investment you want to allow for the coming year. That will give you targets and an idea of what profit you might make (and therefore what holiday or car you can afford).
There are many ways to create a budget and ultimately for it to have any value you need your team to buy-in to it, as it’s them that will have to deliver results.
We can work with you and your team to come up with the right kind of budget (bottom up; top down; zero based etc.) and integrate that with your reporting systems so you monitor actual performance against the budget. Then you can see if you are on the right track.
Part way through your year you may look at your regular reports and see that things are going well or badly. What effect will those trends or results have on the full year’s performance? A forecast will tell you.
If you’ve reached capacity in your warehouse or offices or systems and need to make alterations, you need to know the effect those changes will have.
We have software that will show you the impact on your cash flow, profit or Balance Sheet of your latest forecast of how you are going to perform. We have the people who can explain those results to you in your language.