Financial Management & Budgeting Flashcards
7 cards from real CSA practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Financial Management & Budgeting flashcards as text
Which financial document summarizes an organization's assets, liabilities, and equity at a specific point in time?
Answer: Balance Sheet
The balance sheet (statement of financial position) shows what an organization owns (assets), owes (liabilities), and the net worth (equity) at a snapshot in time.
An IT project is estimated to cost $500,000 but is now forecasted to cost $650,000. The $150,000 difference is known as:
Answer: Budget overrun / cost variance
A cost variance (or budget overrun) is the difference between the planned budget and the revised forecast or actual cost.
A sysadmin is evaluating whether to repair aging servers or replace them. The money already spent on those servers should be ignored in this decision. This concept is called:
Answer: Sunk cost
Sunk costs are past expenditures that cannot be recovered and should not influence future investment decisions.
Which cloud cost optimization strategy involves automatically shutting down non-production servers during nights and weekends?
Answer: Scheduled resource scaling / instance scheduling
Instance scheduling (or scheduled scaling) turns off workloads during idle hours, reducing compute costs by up to 65% for non-production environments.
In IT financial management, what does the term 'run the business' (RTB) spending refer to?
Answer: Costs to maintain and operate existing IT systems and services
Run-the-business (RTB) costs cover keeping existing systems operational—maintenance, support, licensing—as opposed to grow/transform-the-business projects.
A sysadmin is asked to identify IT costs that remain constant regardless of usage levels. These are best described as:
Answer: Fixed costs
Fixed costs (e.g., data center leases, perpetual licenses) do not change with usage volume, unlike variable costs that scale with consumption.
Your company uses a 3-year rolling forecast for IT spending. What is the primary advantage of this approach over a traditional annual budget?
Answer: It provides a continuously updated long-term financial view that adapts to change
A rolling forecast continuously updates the planning horizon, giving leadership a current view of future spending rather than a static snapshot from last year.