It is very easy to get caught up in just trying to get stuff done, and it can feel easier to make decisions on behalf of your budgetholders. Half of them aren't interested anyway, and it just makes work for you, right?
Obviously I think that's wrong, or I wouldn't be writing this post.
My advice to you: view improving each department's budgeting experience as an incredible Trojan horse to building your overall relationship with them.
Much of the business probably views finance as a taker. Wrongly, of course! But they often think finance just turns up and asks for stuff - when they’re not busy saying no.
Instead, turn up and ask them how you can make their budgeting process easier. You will be surprised how much that turns people who were hard to work with into allies.
And guess what? You don't just do the budget, so there’s other stuff to talk about.
A fabulous side effect of understanding how each department needs to plan is that you will...understand each department. And it might well be that nobody from finance has really tried to do that before.
Ask open ended questions about how their department runs. Not: what rows do you need on this spreadsheet? More: Tell me about your day to day work. What's difficult to plan for?
Because difficult to plan for is typically also just...difficult. If you ask open ended questions, most of the time their responses - the order in which they tell you things - will tell you what's top of mind for them.
And we all want to be strategic partners to the business, right? I only read that about 32,000 times on LinkedIn every day.
Well, when you’re doing all this, try and find one non-budget related thing that you can do for each department - ideally something that the head of department has visibility on, but anyone will do.
Quite often a small change in a report or a KPI will make things better for them - and in turn, better for you.
