To state the obvious: budgeting is complex. Budgeting for strategic initiatives or accounting for special projects makes it even more so. Sometimes you want your department heads to submit their own initiatives and other times you want to dictate to departments which initiatives they need to budget for. But either way – you always want…    Read More

Ultimately your budget needs to be a numerical expression of the strategic plan. At XLerant, we believe the best way to align your budget to strategy is to reach out to the people on the front-lines – your employees!  But when your budgeting process engages multiple participants across the organization it becomes as much an…    Read More

To ZBB or not to ZBB? For finance teams considering the pros and cons of zero based budgeting – that is the question! Zero based budgeting offers a lot of benefits for organizations seeking greater sustainability or a competitive edge.  But it also has a fair number of challenges. Traditional baseline budgeting (using the previous…    Read More

The Headaches of Headcount Planning: For most organizations – headcount planning (including salary and benefits) accounts for a whopping 50-80% of your budget. So…it’s critical to your bottom line (and your staff morale) to get it right. But there are a lot of moving parts – not the least of which is confidence that you…    Read More

Group projects. A uniquely painful experiment that many of us try to avoid at all cost… Two-way communication between team members is often a challenge. Someone (or several “someones”) are perpetually behind and need to be coaxed along. There’s always formatting variations in the final document (no matter how clearly you established guidelines up front)….    Read More