It’s difficult to think of a business process that is more unpopular than budgeting. In nearly two decades of writing and talking on the subject, I have yet to come across anyone who is prepared to stand up and say it is a good thing.

Organisations operate in an uncontrollable and often unpredictable business environment, such as market demand, energy, inflation and exchange rates. As a consequence, the role of planning is to help manage what can be controlled to produce outcomes that will achieve organisational objectives, within an uncontrollable and unknowable external environment.

Spreadsheets are without doubt the ‘killer’ application that turned the PC into an indispensable business tool. Before then, computing was the preserve of geeks and specialists who spoke in a language few accountants could understand as they served expensive, inaccessible machines locked away in their own air-conditioned environment.

Why, when everyone hates it, do we still have traditional budgeting? My tentative answer to this would be that most people were not aware of the alternatives.