Budgeting is a process
Piotr Ukowski
The budgeting system aims to ensure the development of a plan and control its implementation in the multidimensional analytical space. To be named a modern system, it should allow budgeting of multiple measures, consolidation and versioning of plans, and also flexibly manage the time dimension (any budgetary periods, rolling budgets). Is that all?
It is hard to argue with the statement that budgeting is a process. Anyone who has dealt with planning in a medium or large organization knows that this process is labor-intensive, involves many people from different enterprise departments in a variety of ways, and that problems with completing one stage has a negative effect on subsequent works; consequently, the management of workflow associated with it is often a bigger problem than entering the right values in a worksheet. What should, therefore, be done to prevent budgeting from becoming an unpleasant obligation for the management staff and to give it a motivational feature, so that it is used for effective management and ensures proper communication with all levels of management?
The answer is full integration of the budgeting system with the workflow system and with multidimensional analytical fields providing data for planning and to reporting subsystems.
Thanks to the process-oriented budgeting approach, we provide control and information at every stage of plan development and verification. The workflow system provides information on the state of the budget, the persons responsible for the implementation of particular tasks and the deadlines for implementation, finding the problems and downtimes, and which elements of the plan require the most effort. Definable work paths enable management of the entire process, from task allocation, resource and time allocation, distribution and consolidation of results, reporting on implementation, to taking corrective actions.
In this way, a complex organizational problem is provided with mechanisms that let you fully control it. The workflow system becomes the “bloodstream” of the controlling system and, in particular, of the budgeting system, ensuring the allocation of tasks and provision of information to the right people at the right time, while providing advanced control mechanisms at every stage of the process.