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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
Incredible Video on Coordination & PlanningHow do you get 185 people in 12 countries, who have never met before, to come together and sing in a virtual choir? Coordination & planning, that’s how. I don’t want to give too much away, but this video will set you back on your heels. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7o7BrlbaDs I could spend a lot of time explaining… 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 |
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 |
