Reverse Engineering the Budget ProcessReverse engineering (the process of starting with a product and taking it apart to see how it works) has been used in product development for decades. Many organizations use this as a best practice in copying some key product or concept from a competitor. When applied to a process, it is the practice of starting… Read More |
Seducing Users to Improve the Budget ProcessIn today’s world of software, people are used to being seduced by personal applications that make things simplistic…like Google or Facebook. They now expect that business software will follow suit. Wikipedia defines seduction as the process of deliberately enticing, corrupting, persuading, or inducing a person to engage in behavior. The word seduction stems from Latin… Read More |
Excel in Budgeting – Friend or Foe?Most organizations still use Microsoft Excel as their budget preparation tool. The reason for this is that the general ledger or ERP providers don’t focus on, or even understand, the budget process or budget workflow and do not think about this from the perspective of the average user or institution. So, financial people took matters… Read More |
Accounting for Special Projects: Budgeting for Strategic InitiativesTo state the obvious: budgeting is complex. Budgeting for strategic initiatives or accounting for special projects makes it even more so. Sometimes you want your department heads to submit their own initiatives and other times you want to dictate to departments which initiatives they need to budget for. But either way – you always want… 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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
