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2.1.1 Business income

Predicting the income side of a business is usually much more complicated than working out your personal income. As an employee you would most likely receive a salary or wage on a regular basis. Businesses, on the other hand, do not often have one source of revenue and may be paid infrequently. Let's start from first principles to make sure we understand how a business can estimate its future income.

A business's income depends on the volume of sales of products or services it generates. In business, we call this income sales revenue, or revenue. A business needs to estimate the sales revenue for the next financial period. In most organisations it is the owner of the business, or the most senior manager who would do this. In a small business the sole proprietor, or partners, carry out this process. In medium and large business it will be the senior manager or Chief Executive Officer (C.E.O.) who will perform this task.

Working out sales revenue for the organisation is often done in three stages:

Multiply the sell price per unit by the number of units that we think we are going to sell. This gives you the total estimated sales revenue for the period using the following formula:

Sales revenue = sell price per unit X the number of units produced.

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