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Why you need a Rosetta Stone for budgeting
Managers and Accountants speak two different languages, so you need a Rosetta Stone to interpret. If you don’t remember the story, Egyptian hieroglyphics were a complete mystery until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. The inscription on the stone records a...
Is Excel an impediment to communication?
Does the traditional budget template itself become an impediment to communication? I believe the answer is YES. And incidentally, it doesn’t matter if you use Excel or a million dollar system. If it looks like a spreadsheet, and quacks like a spreadsheet —...
Manager-Speak vs Accounting-Speak
The language of Accounting is rooted in the General Ledger. Finance people pride themselves in knowing the general ledger accounts inside and out, and often they refer to these accounts BY NUMBER rather than by their description. Who else does that? Because...
CFO Mag Article on Winning Over Your Budget Holders
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...
How do YOU define an “effective corporate budget process”?
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...
Are you communicating effectively in your budget process?
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...
Is Budgeting driven more by politics than by strategy?
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...
Why do we budget anyway? What’s the point?
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...
Budgeting is as much a communication process as it is a financial one
I remember when I was a Financial Analyst at Pepsi, being at the office late at night during the budget cycle, crunching the numbers and hoping that they’d add up right and tie out. Frankly, if you had wanted to talk to me about the communication side of...
