Budgeting no longer helps organisations to perform better. On the contrary. It prevents organisations from performing to their full potential, because given the level of volatility, uncertainty and ambiguity in the world only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know. “The future ain’t what it used to be”, as the American baseball player Yogi Berra once put it.

We all know the budget and we all hate it! So why do we continue to do it when it represents a static picture of the world seen at one moment in time? It’s not like we haven’t realized that the world is a lot more dynamic these days.

On November 5th 2019 the sixth meeting of the Brussels FP&A Board, launched in November 2016, gathered 40 financial professionals from companies such as Anheuser-Busch InBev, Barco, Bekaert, Puratos, UCB, to name but a few.

The idea of a budget is so core to financial wisdom that it’s one of the first lessons we learnt from our parents for keeping our finances (and lives) on track. Annual Budgeting exercises have been the norm in almost all companies, big and small, across the world for decades. However, in recent years, there has been a lot of news about companies, some very prominent headline-grabbing ones, doing away with their annual budgets and moving to a monthly rolling forecast-based system.