This presentation involves the shift from historical reporting to predictive costing such as capacity-sensitive driver-based rolling financial forecasts, what-if analysis, marginal cost analysis (e.g., pricing) and target costing for new products and services.

The annual budgeting process is being criticized as obsolete soon after it is published, prone to gamesmanship, cumbersome to consolidate cost center spreadsheets, not being volume sensitive, and disconnected from the strategy. The challenge is how to resolve these deficiencies. It can be done through driver-based expense projections also useful for decision analysis.

The annual budget is often perceived as a fiscal exercise done by the accountants that is: (1) disconnected from the executive team’s strategy, and (2) does not adequately reflect future volume drivers. The budget exercise is often scorned as being obsolete soon after it is produced, and biased toward politically muscled managers who know how to overstate and “pad” their budget request. To complicate matters, traditional budgets are typically incremented or decremented by a small percent change from each cost center’s prior year’s spending level. This “use it or lose it” behavior by managers in the last few months of the fiscal year unnecessarily pumps up their prior year’s costs and consequently confuses analysis of who really needs how much budget in the coming year.

This event is scheduled and hosted for CPA Halton-Peel, Hamilton, Durham, Toronto South and Toronto East assigned members ONLY.

To understand the criticisms of the traditional budgeting process and learn how to replace it with capacity-sensitive driver-based budgeting and advance do driver-based rolling financial forecasts. The latter is essential to manage future net cash flow.