Laboratory management needs to understand and participate in cost accounting and budgeting to demonstrate fiscal responsibility for the resources allocated to department services. Laboratorians understand that "what gets measured gets managed" through their QC and accreditation processes, so applying this concept to the budget process should make sense. Planning the budget and monitoring the data collected monthly to align with what is done with QC data. Trends and shifts can be spotted early, root causes identified, and corrections made either in process or a new budget depending on the circumstances. Laboratory goals need to be set, assumptions made, forecasts set, and information charted and monitored. Not quite an L and J chart, but the idea is the same.
