Budgeting to Strategy in Higher Education – A Recorded WebinarWe ran a webinar last week that drew a lot of attention in higher education. If you work for a college (or if you’re planning on sending your children to college) you want to watch this. As one person attending the event commented afterward, “We’ve been struggling with financial issues since 2008, and this is… Read More |
Someday is now… Somebody is youSomeday we’re going to make our budget process better… somebody should really do that. How often have you thought that? How often have you discussed that with the people you work with? Well… that some day is now, and that somebody is you. I know firsthand that leading an effort to redesign the planning process… Read More |
It Takes A Village To Build A BudgetThere’s no doubt that Finance runs the budget process, and probably should. But we can get so focused on the mechanics of getting the budget done, that we can almost forget that it takes a village to build it. Let’s keep in mind that the purpose of budget process is to allocate resources, and a… Read More |
Is Your Budget Process Fair?I realize that the question isn’t one you stop and think about during the heat of the budget battle. There are templates to be created, links that need to be validated, formulas to be edited. And that’s just preparation! All of that work represents just a fraction of the time spent developing, reviewing and reworking… Read More |
Naked Budgeting(The Streaker of ’74 behind Oscar presenter David Niven) For those of you who are squeamish, I apologize for the Streaker of ’74. He won’t show up again in this post, but I have to get your attention somehow. Now on to more serious matters… When it comes to budgeting, most organizations are not that… Read More |
Mega Trends in Budgeting: Budgeting to StrategyAs 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 a reader survey on budgeting and planning,… Read More |
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 — it’s an impediment to communication. Let’s step back a minute and look… Read More |
Why locking down spreadsheet templates doesn’t workWe 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 easily add justifications and detail. For example, we have a client that has an Administrative Services… Read More |
Partnering with your budget usersOur 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 you’ve been thinking about ways to involve them LESS in the process…. Read More |
Stanford Ph.D Defines BudgetSo 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 at Drew, and manages the budget process there. But that’s not all. Chris… Read More |
