This 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

Some 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

Probably 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 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 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

So 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

Our 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

We 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