Making Budgeting Work in the Real World

Advice from the sages of budgeting

Peer-enriched learning courses stimulate intelligent dialogue and debate and provide a valuable and evolving resource of professional knowledge and experience. These courses are topical, practical and highly relevant to today’s changing market. Each module is split into two activities: Understanding the issues and Putting it into practice. The first encourages learners to think about a topic, drawing on their own professional experience and knowledge. The second helps learners to put ideas and/or theories into practice as part of their day-to-day work.

This course enables the learner to:

• Choose the most appropriate budgeting method
• Devise ways to overcome weaknesses in their current budgeting system
• Consider ways of better communicating and presenting budgets to non-financial staff
• Meet the varying budget preparation needs of different departments

Topics:

Things aren’t what they seem

• Advice from the sages of budgeting
• The budgeting cycle
• Top down or bottom up?
• The link between planning and budgeting
• Organisational time and resource

Alternative budgeting systems

• Budgeting and/or forecasting
• Rolling versus fixed period budgeting
• Incremental versus ZBB
• Functional versus ABB
• Life cycle budgeting

Issues in setting budgets

• Approaches to forecasting budgets
• Using spreadsheets for budgeting
• Organisational culture
• Non-finance budget holders
• The participation debate
• The perennial negotiation battle
• Budgets as an evaluation and reward tool

Monitoring and presenting budgets

• A suitable management tool?
• A true measure of performance?
• When to budget?
• Vulnerable variances
• Presentation pitfalls

The future of budgeting

• Is traditional budgeting dead?
• Living with budgets
• Beyond budgetring. Part 1: Adaptive management
• Beyond budgeting. Part 2: Decentralised decision making