“Stories and lessons from an unexpected journey in finance.”

Somewhere on your calendar there is a two-day planning offsite, and a template is already circulating.

I’ve run this cycle across businesses from $50M to $2.5B. Three things are wrong with it.

It takes too long. Not six weeks. At most companies it runs three or four months, which means you are planning against conditions that no longer exist by the time the deck is approved. The duration is the staleness.

It costs more than it returns. That’s a full quarter of your team’s best capacity, producing a document that stops being referenced sometime in March.

And most of it isn’t planning. It’s negotiation. Every business unit submits a number they’re confident they can beat. Finance arbitrates. The output is a settlement, not a forecast, and everyone in the room knows it.

Here’s the part most people skip when they write this post.

At a PE-backed SaaS business, that same annual process is what caught an $8M Adjusted EBITDA gap against our covenant floors — early enough in the cycle that we could still act on it. No rolling forecast would have surfaced that. It took a full-year view, tested against a hard constraint, in October rather than February.

So I’m not against budgeting. I’m against the ceremony bolted onto it.

What I do instead takes about three weeks.

Build the constraint case first. Not what we hope to do. What has to be true for us to clear the covenant, fund the plan, hit the floor. That’s a finance exercise, and it’s a week.

Take it to the board as a range, not a point. A single number invites debate about the number. A range with named drivers invites debate about the drivers, which is the conversation you actually wanted.

Let the operating detail follow. Two to three weeks after the constraint is agreed — not three months of negotiation before it.

Same rigor. Same covenant test. A fraction of the calendar.

The annual budget isn’t the problem. The three months of negotiation wrapped around it is.

How long does your cycle actually take, start to finish? Not the official answer.

#TheAccidentalCFO #FPandA #BudgetSeason #FinanceLeadership #INERSEC