Budgets were invented in the Industrial Age as an efficient management tool. So why in this day and age of VUCA, most of the organisations around the world are still so hung up on traditional budgeting?

The current debate around Return To Office (RTO) likely heralds the biggest shift in the workplace since the emergence of the assembly line in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Is this relevant for an FP&A audience though? I’d argue it is fundamentally relevant for a number of reasons, not least because it is one of the biggest impacts of Covid-19 on the global business environment. This is a debate that, from a financial planning and analysis perspective, we cannot sit out. 

Those who follow developments in FP&A closely have proclaimed a New Age of Zero-Based Budgeting. So what exactly does this mean? What do organisations find so appealing about this alternative to traditional budgeting, and how can we best implement it?

Scenario Planning is a technique used in FP&A to help guide companies through considerable uncertainty, contemplating various paths of possibilities. Despite our best attempts, our forecasts will have inherent errors; actual results deviating from the figures we had anticipated hitting.