Stuart Warner explains the barriers to effective budgeting and enables you to create and manage budgets more successfully. The author's practical experience, coupled with many hours discussing the issues in the classroom, enables him to frame the key questions and open the debate about how to create an effective and efficient budgeting process.
Making Budgeting Work in the Real World is part of Nelson Croom's Issues and Debates suite of learning . Each module is split into two activities: Understanding the issues and Putting it into practice. The first encourages you to think about a topic, drawing on your own professional experience and knowledge. The second helps you to put ideas and/or theories into practice as part of your day-to-day work.
Course overview
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 budgeting? Part 1: Adaptive management
- Beyond budgeting? Part 2: Decentralised decision making