How Organizational Culture Impacts Financial Planning & PerformanceThere’s a phenomenon that occurs as organizations grow. To facilitate expansion and support rapid growth, they create dedicated departments. But over time, the creation of these dedicated teams can eventually have a negative impact on growth – affecting communication, reducing transparency, and shifting allegiances. In a nutshell, it changes the culture. And the culture impacts… Read More |
Truth in advertising (and sales) – why business development culture matters.How exactly do you assess an organization’s business development culture … their ethical (or not so ethical) approach to sales and marketing? And – why should you care? For many of our customers in the higher education, nonprofit, and business services industries – sales and marketing doesn’t follow a traditional “pipeline to close” process. So… Read More |
Budgeting Persona: Finding the “Right-Fit”As a software company we’re constantly striving to find that “right-fit” – something that builds in all the important complexities of budgeting yet seems effortless and simple. In order to make a software solution that truly excels in usability – we have to match the needs, style, and thought-processes of our customer’s organizational and budgeting… Read More |
Top 5 Benefits of Multi-participant BudgetingGroup projects. A uniquely painful experiment that many of us try to avoid at all cost… Two-way communication between team members is often a challenge. Someone (or several “someones”) are perpetually behind and need to be coaxed along. There’s always formatting variations in the final document (no matter how clearly you established guidelines up front)…. Read More |
Paying for Poor Performance: The Costs of Avoiding ChangeWhy would we ever “manage”, “accept the status quo”, or “make-do” if we are the paying customer? Sounds irrational – yet it ends up happening to most of us. For example, think of a time where you made a major purchase or changed service providers and didn’t love the result… Maybe you switched cell phone… Read More |
When the Employee Suggestion Box Meets Budgeting…Remember the employee suggestion box? There might still be some relics mounted on a wall somewhere with a stack of paper and pencils nearby. Can you imagine being the person responsible for translating all of those anonymous, one-to-two sentence thoughts into actionable organizational improvements? Today of course, technology is lending a hand. A quick search… Read More |
8 Quick Tips to Avoid Headcount Planning & Budgeting HeadachesThe Headaches of Headcount Planning: For most organizations – headcount planning (including salary and benefits) accounts for a whopping 50-80% of your budget. So…it’s critical to your bottom line (and your staff morale) to get it right. But there are a lot of moving parts – not the least of which is confidence that you… Read More |
To ZBB or Not to ZBB? Evaluating Zero Based Budgeting.To ZBB or not to ZBB? For finance teams considering the pros and cons of zero based budgeting – that is the question! Zero based budgeting offers a lot of benefits for organizations seeking greater sustainability or a competitive edge. But it also has a fair number of challenges. Traditional baseline budgeting (using the previous… Read More |
Documentation, Justification & Communication: Key Ingredients for Budgeting to StrategyUltimately your budget needs to be a numerical expression of the strategic plan. At XLerant, we believe the best way to align your budget to strategy is to reach out to the people on the front-lines – your employees! But when your budgeting process engages multiple participants across the organization it becomes as much an… Read More |
Budgeting as an employee engagement strategy?Budgeting as an employee engagement strategy? Yes, it sounds ridiculous. Who looks forward to budgeting? For most of us the answer is: “Not me, not ever.” So how can budgeting (a process that is as dreaded as a dentist appointment or tax season) actually improve employee engagement? At the core – it’s about having your… Read More |
