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 |
Budget Strategies for Non-Profits in an Uncertain EconomyIn a previous blog we talked about the unique challenges of budgeting in the not for profit sector (http://blog.xlerant.com/wordpress/unique-challenges-of-budgeting-in-not-for-profit ) We were overwhelmed by the response, and decided to follow it up with a live webinar. View the webinar recording, to hear directly from two leading CFOs who will share their experience in overcoming the… Read More |
Solving Ambiguous Problems – What Successful Companies Get That the Rest of Us Don’tI’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with some of the best run companies over the years and I’ve come to appreciate what really separates them from “the merely good”. Some of what makes great companies so successful, like hiring great talent, is quite obvious. But in this blog I’d like to share one of… Read More |
The Malcolm Baldrige Award Criteria and Better Software PurchasingYou’ve been through the drill before. Some process in your organization needs fixing and a team is formed to address it. Before you know it, you’re looking at software as a solution. That’s not a bad thing, but the way we go about it often is. The team comes up with a requirements grid (often… 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 |
Business Officer Magazine: Self Service Budgeting at DrewI was honored to work with Howard Buxbaum on “Self Service Budgeting at Drew University” which appears in the November 2011 issue of Business Officer Magazine. Here’s an excerpt: In a meeting with Drew University’s president, we not only reviewed the points outlined in this article but also talked about the higher-level issue of accountability,… 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 |
The Missing Link: Budgeting and ExecutionThere are two primary purposes of budgeting. The one most people think of first is to put a cap spending. But that’s only one reason why organizations (and people) budget. The other reason why organizations budget is to ensure what’s important gets done. And let’s face it, just because something is important doesn’t mean it… Read More |
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 |
You can’t create an Interactive BudgetMap in ExcelHere’s a fundamental problem with the budget process we wanted to address. People don’t like budgeting. That’s really the elephant in the living room we’re all trying to navigate around, isn’t it? Here are some of the words I’ve heard line managers and department heads use to describe budgeting: Stressful… Intimidating… Frustrating… Confusing. I’ve heard… Read More |