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

Open most budget submissions and you’ll find the same thing underneath: last year, plus a percent.

Not because the business units are lazy. Because nobody told them what the plan has to achieve, so they defaulted to the only defensible number available.

That’s a sequencing failure, and it happens before the cycle even starts. The templates go out, submissions come back anchored on history, and finance spends the next several weeks reconciling assumptions that were never compatible in the first place.

The fix is unglamorous. Before any template circulates, get the key stakeholders in one room and agree the drivers.

Not targets. Drivers. What actually moves the outcome next year, which of those we control, and what has to be true for the plan to clear its constraints. Leave that session with four or five named drivers everyone recognizes, and the submissions that follow are built on the same foundation instead of fifteen private ones.

But there’s a second reason to do it early, and I think it’s the more important one.

A long cycle makes it unsafe to challenge an assumption.

Think about month three of a four-month process. Someone realizes a core assumption is wrong. Raising it now means unwinding weeks of everyone else’s work, reopening settled negotiations, and being the person who blew up the timeline. So they don’t raise it. The assumption survives to approval, and everyone finds out in Q2.

Compression isn’t really about speed. It’s about keeping assumptions challengeable long enough for someone to actually challenge them.

A comment on last week’s post described taking the planning cycle from six weeks to under four. What struck me wasn’t the time saved. It was what he did with it — more room to test tradeoffs and pressure the assumptions, rather than more time going back and forth on submissions.

That’s the whole return on compression. Not a faster budget.

A budget somebody was still willing to argue with.

Does your driver conversation happen before the templates go out, or after the submissions come back?

#TheAccidentalCFO #FPandA #BudgetSeason #FinanceLeadership #INERSEC