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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
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 |
