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The Finance Check: Planning

Questions about how the budget and forecasts get made. A few minutes.

At the end, if you’re based in the UK or Ireland, you can pick one area for a free hour of consulting time, such as a review of a budgeting template that’s giving you trouble. If you’re a charity, it’s two hours.

The result is a link you can bookmark or pass on.

About you

How often do you reforecast?
Across the whole team, roughly how much work goes into one reforecast?
Roughly what’s the average salary of the people doing this work? It’s only used to put a £ figure on the time. We don’t keep it.

Planning

How long does the annual budget take, from the first template going out to sign-off?
The CEO asks what happens if your biggest customer halves its orders. How long until there’s an answer they’d act on?
How long does a full reforecast take, start to finish?
How do budgetholders get their numbers in?
How is the budget built?
How does headcount get into the plan?
How many versions of the budget are going round right now?
Who looks after the planning model?

We’d like to add everyone’s answers up, to say things like how long a budget usually takes. We keep the answers and the month – nothing that says who you are – and only ever publish figures from ten or more people. Untick it if you’d rather not. There’s more in our privacy policy.