Nelson Croom - Making Budgeting Work in the Real World

Budgeting seems so simple in the textbooks. So why does it often fail in practice? Stuart Warner explains the barriers to effective budgeting and enables learners to create and manage more successful budgets. 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.

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.

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Making Budgeting Work in the Real World 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

Target audience

This course is designed to appeal to professionals, both in finance functions and other areas, who are looking for a practical course that enables them to apply budgeting theory and knowledge in their own organisation.