What the Fortune 500 can learn from nonprofitsSome people think it’s only high powered, Fortune 500 companies that need to concern themselves with budgeting and planning. Yet from my experience, nonprofit organizations are just sophisticated and thoughtful about budgeting – maybe more so. Why is that? Partly out of necessity. If a nonprofit is sloppy about budgeting they run out of cash…. Read More |
That’s Not My NumberProbably the worst moments I had as a Manager of Financial Planning and Analysis when I was at Pepsi Cola International and Reader’s Digest; was when someone would say, “That’s not my number!” The embarrassment factor was a function of A) The level executives in the room… B) How late in the planning process we… Read More |
Isn’t it amazing — The evolution of budgetingIsn’t it amazing when someone comes up with an idea and everyone says “That’s obvious, why didn’t they do this 5 years ago?” It’s more amazing still that when the idea catches on nobody would think of going back to the old way of doing things. Malcolm Gladwell talks a lot about this in his… Read More |
The Circle of DoomThe consequences of not budgeting to your strategy (i.e., not integrating strategy and budgeting) can be pretty severe. We call it The Circle of Doom. And it begins with the development of strategy that never really gets done. I had a CEO tell me about the frustration he felt after a strategic planning retreat where… 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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
Manager-Speak vs Accounting-SpeakThe language of Accounting is rooted in the General Ledger. Finance people pride themselves in knowing the general ledger accounts inside and out, and often they refer to these accounts BY NUMBER rather than by their description. Who else does that? Because Accountants think in General Ledger account terms, when it comes time to do… Read More |
CFO Mag Article on Winning Over Your Budget HoldersA possible solution [to getting line managers to become willing participants in the budget process] says John Hagerty, vice president and research fellow at AMR Research, would be to create a more intuitive, text-based interface for budgeting software. “Instead of forcing people into a form that’s easier for you, you could pull from them the… Read More |
