I minored in management, one of the simple but big ideas I came away with was that notion of optimizing for "cash flow" (i.e. income minus expenses) can sometimes be more important than profit alone, ie staying cash-flow positive (not underwater) every month as opposed to just at year end.

Turns out this idea is pretty powerful in personal budgeting too. I have a Google Sheets document with these columns (item + months):

Item|1|2|3|4..|11|12|Year

And I split the item categories into Income, Expenses, and Once-off expenses. I put all my recurring inflows into income, recurring outflows into Expenses, and Once-offs is a free form where I enter non-recurring purchases like a new computer or such.

On top of each month column I carry over the previous month's net income, then add income minus expenses minus once-off expenses. This is "cash flow". The goal is to aim to be cash-flow positive every month, and also to maximize the year-end net income -- which then gets invested or carried over to next year.

It then becomes a game to try to optimize the year end net income by doing course corrections every month, while maintaining a non-negative monthly net income.

(incidentally this is also how many businesses are run; well the conservative ones anyway)