NEUBRAINER, the official blog of Neubrain

High performing Comptroller organizations can add tremendous organizational value beyond just financial transaction processing and audit readiness tasks.

By leading in the establishment of key processes, promoting enterprise-wide collaboration and a disciplined financial management culture, they can drastically improve the ability of an organization to achieve performance targets, strengthen the link between financial plans and strategic objectives, and enhance strategic decision-making.

The United States is a country with a mature and educated digital population, where citizens constantly question whether their tax dollars are being put to good use. It’s no surprise, then, that they want to collaborate with their government on designing future public services.

Citizens want a clear and stable vision of the government services available to them. One way to provide that is through transparency in financial and performance reporting. Sharing formulated strategy, implementation progress and performance results help taxpayers understand how strategic or priority goals translate into dollars, so they can see how their money makes a difference. But citizens are not the only beneficiaries in this scenario. Transparency forces government administrators to run operations more efficiently. Fostering citizen engagement through data sharing helps government officials better understand the priorities of individuals and communities.

Now that we know what sharing can provide to citizens and government workers alike, the next step is determining what information to share. Here are some ideas:

It is a common mistake to assume that automation alone will bring necessary budget process improvements to an organization. Automating an inefficient or unintelligent bud­get process just makes the same process faster, not better.

The reality is traditional practices that govern budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting and  risk management are becoming obsolete in the context of a fast paced digital marketplace and a volatile and uncertain global economy. Long established budget practices provide a false sense of security and fail to cope with the speed and volatility of today’s markets.

Additionally, the traditional budgeting process is widely de­cried, both by FP&A personnel—who must reconcile the requests from business managers with the targets handed down from the C-suite—and the business line managers they support—who view the budget process as a bureau­cratic exercise, a distraction from their job, a drag on their time, and a purely finance-driven process.

As you consider a new budget system, remember this is the optimal time to evaluate the strategies that can help your organization develop a more agile and intelligent budget process, use this process as decision making tool rather than a negotiation, and positively change your orga­nization’s perception of budgeting.

The following are a few strategies and best practices to consider:

While most modern budgeting software solutions can eliminate the basic spreadsheet challenges associated with data capture and simple aggregation, they typically do not take the next step: enabling the organization to use its data to improve budget decisions and the linkages between budgets and outcomes.

After many years observing organizations' budgeting and forecasting software selection and buying processes, we have discovered that many organizations, no matter their size, often jump into the buying process under that assumption that new software will be the answer to all of the organization's budgeting woes. While software can help improve an already well-established budgeting and forecasting process, software in and of itself is never the solution.