Chocolate and inspiration found in Hershey, PAI was privileged this week to attend the annual EACUBO meeting in Hershey, PA. The event began with a keynote address from Erin Gruwel, author of Freedom Writers Diary and the founder of Freedom Writers Foundation. Erin’s remarkable story was turned into a feature film in 2007 starring Hilary Swank.The video clip above is from… 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 |
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 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 8 Killers of Budgeting (and what to do about them)When I was a Manager of Financial Planning & Analysis for Pepsi in New York we experienced some challenges with our planning process. Doesn’t everybody? I thought these struggles were localized, so when I took a two year assignment with Pepsi in Europe, I thought I’d see a different set of issues. I didn’t. They… Read More |
How Impact Bias and Focalism Make for Bad DecisionsPeople who study purchasing behavior have discovered a curious phenomenon they call Impact Bias. It’s a tendency to overestimate the impact a particular change will have. There’s another phenomenon called Focalism; the tendency to magnify the importance of one thing until it overshadows everything else. Taken together, Impact Bias and Focalism distort reality, like a… Read More |
The role of leadership in BudgetingI don’t often do this, but a colleague of mine sent me a short video from the last TED Conference that I wanted to share with you. It’s on leadership, and it’s by a brilliant guy named Derek Sivers. It’s short (3 min), funny, and makes some very solid points. We don’t often associate Leadership… Read More |
Mega Trends in Budgeting: Renewed Focus on CommunicationThis mega trend is something that’s come full circle; and it’s such a major trend we’ve actually done a whole webinar on this topic… which you can find a link to on our website. It’s tough to boil a whole webinar down into a couple of slides, but let me give it a try. Think… Read More |
Mega Trends in Budgeting: Budgeting in Business TermsThis trend recognizes that line managers and people in accounting speak different languages, and you need some way to interpret. Managers don’t think like accountants, at least not those managers outside of Finance. Here’s a really obvious example of that. If I grabbed an invoice at random and brought it to the manager who signed… 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 |
