Wherever you can, you should always let your budgetholders not key in monthly currency amounts.
Sometimes that is the most sensible way to plan, sure, but mostly your budgetholders will be happier if they can input things that are based on their day to day.
That’s driver based planning. You get them to think about whatever drives their slice of the business, and then plan based on that.
Critically, that needs to be different for different departments. You'll need to deal with the added complexity, but it's worth it.
There’s huge variety in drivers of course, foot traffic, website traffic, conversion rates, visitors, guests at your hotel, average spend, units...
Even a function like sales, which on the face of it will be ok dealing with financial figures - as they directly affect their compensation - will still prefer to not have to come up with the totals directly. Let them suggest numbers of deals and average deal sizes for different segments, and calculate from there.
If you think you’re not from an industry which has those sorts of drivers, wrong, there are always ways. Most likely you are from an organisation where personnel is the greatest cost. Any new hire should automatically drive recruitment costs, onboarding costs, equipment (and that, in turn, into fixed assets), training - straight away a lot less for the budgetholder to do.
Here's a useful shortcut, Google "startup financial models" and read a few of the articles. They get this in the startup world, the idea of boiling things down to what actually drives things in the business.
The driver based approach then also gives the overall process another huge benefit - which is that it can flag up things that aren't right or don’t make sense, things that can be easily concealed behind financial figures.
Back to sales - your Commercial Director might look at £2 million as a number and think, yes, that looks ok, but if to get there they need to sell 200 deals - gosh, actually that's way more than my current sales team can generate, we need to look at hiring, or whatever action may be needed.
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