Have you ever stepped back and asked yourself, “Why do we go through this budget process anyway? What’s the point?” I remember being in the throws of the budget process at Reader’s Digest, where I managed the process for North America, and asking myself that question a lot. True confessions… in my most cynical moments,…    Read More

A while back The Buttonwood Group and CFO Magazine conducted a reader survey on budgeting and planning and the results are disturbing to look at. I’d like to find out if these results would apply to your organization or not: 2/3 of readers surveyed said their planning process was driven more by Politics than by…    Read More

There are three parts to communication. There’s the telling part, which is often done through email or phone call. Sending the message. Then there’s the receiving part – the person actually read the email or reviewed the document or listened to the voicemail, whatever. These two parts are easy compared to the last part. In…    Read More

There is a boatload of advice on how to shorten the time it takes to complete a corporate budget cycle. I’m all for that. But faster doesn’t necessarily make it any better. If the budget process doesn’t deliver business value to begin with, then the goal of making it faster produces the same lame results…    Read More

A possible solution [to getting line managers to become willing participants in the budget process] says John Hagerty, vice president and research fellow at AMR Research, would be to create a more intuitive, text-based interface for budgeting software. “Instead of forcing people into a form that’s easier for you, you could pull from them the…    Read More