This is part 9 of 12 in a blog series on understanding the risks of your current planning, budgeting and forecasting process. For the next few weeks, we’ll be posting a new article every Wednesday that will look at the challenges of the budgeting process and budgeting best practices. Catch up on last week’s post, Maintain Multiple Budgets Without Multiple Headaches.

You have tasked your key managers and their teams to prepare detailed financial budgets and create plans on how to achieve strategic goals.  Although time is needed to give careful consideration to these budgets and goals, you can’t let the process drag on for too long.  In addition, this is not the time to bring out the ‘rubber-stamp’ and simply accept the plans or budgets as they are provided. It’s simple, bad budgets can lead to bad decisions.  You can improve budget planning and review process with structure and technology.

Senior management requires the participation of various employees and managers in the planning, budgeting and forecasting process.  The more people involved in the budget planning process, the more time-consuming it can be to send reminders and follow-up on your requests for information as well as ask for clarification once data has been received.  Without structure, the process can take longer than it should.

Download 21 Ways Your Budgeting Process Puts Your Business at Risk to learn how you can get the collaboration you need in the time allotted and avoid bad budgeting decisions and look at budgeting best practices.  A centralized budgeting solution offers the structure you need for consistency and control during the entire budgeting process.  You can prepare templates for each of your divisions or business units to use, which streamlines the budget entry process.  Automatic workflows can quickly route the completed budgets to managers and senior management for review and approval.  Access to notes and justifications make it easier for managers to understand the reasons behind the data provided and where to go for further clarification.

Planning, budgeting and forecasting for the future of the business takes the collective insight and collaboration of many people.  Making the process more efficient, with templates and workflows, gives your people time to put careful thought and consideration into their data.  It also gives senior management time to review the plans and make sure they can support strategic plans and goals.  Download 21 Ways Your Budgeting Process Puts Your Business at Risk and contact us for more information about getting rid of the rubber-stamps for a more efficient centralized budgeting solution, like True Sky.