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Mega Trends in Budgeting: Renewed Focus on Communication
This mega trend is something that’s come full circle; and it’s such a major trend we’ve actually done a whole webinar on this topic… which you can find a link to on our website. It’s tough to boil a whole webinar down into a couple of slides,...
Mega Trends in Budgeting: Budgeting to Strategy
As part of our study of trends in budgeting, we identified the trend of Budgeting to Strategy. I think it’s been a long time coming, and the good news is that technology has finally caught up to make it easier to accomplish. A little background. CFO Magazine ran...
What the Fortune 500 can learn from nonprofits
Some people think it’s only high powered, Fortune 500 companies that need to concern themselves with budgeting and planning. Yet from my experience, nonprofit organizations are just sophisticated and thoughtful about budgeting – maybe more so. Why is that?...
That’s Not My Number
Probably the worst moments I had as a Manager of Financial Planning and Analysis when I was at Pepsi Cola International and Reader’s Digest; was when someone would say, “That’s not my number!” The embarrassment factor was a function of A) The...
Isn’t it amazing — The evolution of budgeting
Isn’t it amazing when someone comes up with an idea and everyone says “That’s obvious, why didn’t they do this 5 years ago?” It’s more amazing still that when the idea catches on nobody would think of going back to the old way of...
The Circle of Doom
The consequences of not budgeting to your strategy (i.e., not integrating strategy and budgeting) can be pretty severe. We call it The Circle of Doom. And it begins with the development of strategy that never really gets done. I had a CEO tell me about the frustration...
Stanford Ph.D Defines Budget
So what’s a Budget? Well according to one of our favorite customers, Chris Van Wyk at Drew University, “The budget should be a financial representation of the strategic plan.” Now Chris is an interesting guy. He is Associate Vice President of Finance...
Partnering with your budget users
Our recommendations are for improving the budget process are grounded on two basic principles. The first is that to improve communications we need more participation from managers, not less. I know some of you are dealing with a very frustrated user community and...
Why locking down spreadsheet templates doesn’t work
We have discussed in this blog a big concept – Explicit Budgets for projects or initiatives. But not every department really needs that degree of sophistication. Sometimes it’s the small things that can improve communication. Like allowing managers to...
