15 Things You Can’t Do in Excel for Budgeting (but should)Excel is an amazingly great application that has probably delivered more value than just about any other business software in the past 20 years. But as a platform for budgeting… well, it has some serious limitations. Like wouldn’t it be nice to be able to spread budgets based on last year’s actual spending pattern? That… Read More |
A New Method… at MethodI came across an article from CFO Magazine I wanted to share with the community. Method Products, a San Francisco-based maker of environmentally friendly home and personal cleaning products, has enjoyed years of healthy growth, becoming a $100 million, 100-person company since its founding in 2000. But just recently the CFO has led a project… Read More |
Who is Raymond Panko… and why should you care?Raymond Panko, a professor at the University of Hawaii, is the leading expert on spreadsheet errors. Who makes them, why they happen, what rate they’re seen in the average spreadsheet, you name it. He wrote a paper on the subject called What We Know About Spreadsheet Errors first published in the Journal of End User… Read More |
A Failing City Calls in the Budget DoctorEvery once in a while I come across a podcast that I think is illuminating – makes a point but does so in a clever or revealing way. I found one the other day and wanted to share it. A Failing City Calls in the Budget Doctor http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=134430495&m=134431356 It’s only about five minutes, but you’ll… Read More |
Rolling Forecast. Part 3 – Assessment of Rolling ForecastIn part one of this series we looked at the common problems that organizations have with the annual planning/ budgeting process. Recognizing of course that most companies do forecasting as well, we looked at the annual planning process as a proxy for the processes companies deploy year-round to develop financial projections. In part two of… Read More |
Budgeting: A Career Maker… A Career Breaker?The reason why managing the budget process is a high wire act should be obvious. 1) Every corner of the organization is involved or impacted by the process in some way. 2) The process impacts people where it hurts – their wallets. 3) The most senior ranks of the organization are engaged in the process,… Read More |
Should you involve your user community in solution development?When I first moved to Ireland with Pepsi, I brought a lot of New York headquarters ways with me. Some good, some bad. But one of those ways was in how to develop solutions to vexing problems. The foundation of solution development was always the formation of a cross functional team to bring together multiple… Read More |
How to your involve your user communityThe question of how to involve your user community in solution development is an important one; because the ultimate success or failure of any new system is wholly dependent upon whether or not it’s actually embraced by the user community… or rejected. There’s a lot of shelfware out there, and getting your users involved in… Read More |
Getting the story behind the numbersWhen I worked at Pepsi as a FP&A Manager it was drilled into our heads that our job was to “get the story behind the numbers” and be able to communicate that story intelligently. But what does getting the story behind the numbers really mean? The report that almost every finance organization runs each month… Read More |
Changing the face of budgetingI hate the word paradigm, don’t you? It’s been so over used, it hardly seems to have any real meaning left. But in fact it does have meaning — “A framework of understanding; a mindset based on a set of precepts.” The paradigm (don’t cringe) most of us have when it comes to corporate budgeting… Read More |
