Budgeting your startup is one of the most important aspects of ensuring success. Miguel Tovar/University of Houston

According to Jean Murray, a business professor at Palmer College where she taught business startup and finance, the most important thing an entrepreneur must meet head on is budgeting. Startup budgeting is important because it allows you to make an educated guess as to what your expected income and expenses will be.

Murray recommends planning for the first day of your startup.

"You have to start by determining what you'll require on the first day of your business in order to open the doors and start accepting customers or having your website go live," she says.

Your first day budget

Murray says it's best to break down your "day-one startup budget" into four distinct categories:

Facilities cost. This is the cost of your startup location. Your office. Your company building or office or warehouse.

Fixed assets. These are expenditures for furniture, equipment, or company cars that you'll need to establish your company on the first day.

Materials and supplies. This is pretty straightforward. It includes office supplies and promotional stuff. In order to get your company started, you'll need these materials on the first day.

Other expenditures. This can range from paying an accountant to help you build a reliable and efficient HR system, licenses and permits, deposits, legal fees, or any other fees needed on the first day.

Monthly expense "guesstimate"

Murray recommends that you estimate monthly expenses, too. Both of the fixed and variable variety.

"Fixed expenses are expenditures that don't rely on how many customers or subscribers you have. We're talking expenses like rent, utilities, office supplies, insurance, loan payments and utilities," Murray says.

Variable expenses, on the other hand, are expenses that actually DO change with how many customers and subscribers you have monthly.

"Variable expenses range from production costs, commissions, postage and shipping, packaging, and wholesale price of items," Murray explains.

Estimating monthly sales is the hardest aspect of startup budgeting. Nobody can forecast what sales for a new startup will be.

"You'll have to take an educated guess. What are your best and worst case scenarios? Then come up with something in the middle," she advises.

For realistic budgeting, you have to understand that not every sale will be counted. It will depend on what kind of business you are running and how your customers and subscribers pay.

"It's wise to include a collections percentage with your monthly sales estimate. If you estimate sales for February to be $100,000 and your collection percentage is 70%, then you should show that your cash for February is $70,000," Murray suggests.

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This article originally appeared on the University of Houston's The Big Idea.

Rene Cantu is the writer and editor at UH Division of Research.

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Rice University MBA programs rank among top 5 in prestigious annual report

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Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business MBA programs have been ranked among the top five in the country again in The Princeton Review’s 2025 Best Business Schools rankings.

The university's MBA program in finance earned a No. 3 ranking, climbing up two spots from its 2024 ranking. Finance MBA programs at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business and New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business were the only ones to outrank Rice, claiming No. 2 and No. 1 spots, respectively.

Rice's online MBA program was ranked No. 5, compared to No. 4 last year. Indiana University's Bloomington Kelley School of Business' online program claimed the top spot.

“These rankings reflect the commitment of our faculty and staff, the drive and talent of our students and the strong support of our alumni and partners,” Peter Rodriguez, dean of Rice Business, said in a news release. “They are exceptional honors but also reminders — not just of our top-tier programs and world-class faculty and students but of our broader impact on the future of business education.”

Rice also ranked at No. 6 for “greatest resources for minority students."

The Princeton Review’s 2025 business school rankings are based on data from surveys of administrators at 244 business schools as well as surveys of 22,800 students enrolled in the schools’ MBA programs during the previous three academic years.

"The schools that made our lists for 2025 share four characteristics that inform our criteria for designating them as 'best': excellent academics, robust experiential learning components, outstanding career services, and positive feedback about them from enrolled students we surveyed," Rob Franek, The Princeton Review's editor-in-chief, said in a press release. "No b-school is best overall or best for all students, but to all students considering earning an MBA, we highly recommend these b-schools and salute them for their impressive programs."

Rice's finance program has ranked in the top 10 for eight consecutive years, and its online MBA has ranked in the top five for four years.

Rice and the University of Houston also claimed top marks on the Princeton Review's entrepreneurship rankings. Rice ranks as No. 1 on the Top 50 Entrepreneurship: Grad list, and the University of Houston ranked No. 1 on Top 50 Entrepreneurship: Ugrad. Read more here.

Houston named ‘star’ metro for artificial intelligence in new report

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A new report declares Houston one of the country’s 28 “star” hubs for artificial intelligence.

The Houston metro area appears at No. 16 in the Brookings Institution’s ranking of metros that are AI “stars.” The metro areas earned star status based on data from three AI buckets: talent, innovation and adoption. Only two places, the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, made Brookings’ “superstar” list.

According to Brookings, the Houston area had 11,369 job postings in 2024 that sought candidates with AI skills, 210 AI startups (based on Crunchbase data from 2014 to 2024), and 113 venture capital deals for AI startups (based on PitchBook data from 2023 to 2024).

A number of developments are boosting Houston’s AI profile, such as:

Brookings also named Texas’s three other major metros as AI stars:

  • No. 11 Austin
  • No. 13 Dallas-Fort Worth
  • No. 40 San Antonio

Brookings said star metros like Houston “are bridging the gap” between the two superstar regions and the rest of the country. In 2025, the 28 star metros made up 46 percent of the country’s metro-area employment but 54 percent of AI job postings. Across the 28 metros, the number of AI job postings soared 139 percent between 2018 and 2025, according to Brookings.

Around the country, dozens of metros fell into three other categories on Brookings’ AI list: “emerging centers” (14 metros), “focused movers” (29 metros) and “nascent adopters” (79 metros).