What a National Survey on Budgeting Reveals
XLerant recently completed a survey on budgeting and I wanted to share some of the highlights with you here. We will be publishing a whitepaper on the results as well, and if you’d like to reserve a copy, just click here or use the URL below:
http://blog.xlerant.com/budgeting-survey
The whitepaper will provide all the details and statistics, today I just want to highlight some of the major highlights (from my perspective anyway) of the approximately 150 people to date that have participated. You’ll notice I’m not including pie charts and graphs here, apart from the one atop this page, which seems to indicate there's some room for improvement, to put it mildly. We’re saving the catchy graphics for the whitepaper itself, but in this blog post we’ll share the headlines and some key take-aways:
Budgeting is mission critical. You probably already knew that, but isn’t it comforting to know that a majority (over 90%) of your peers agree with you?
Budgeting is getting more scrutiny than in the past. Given the economic downturn, and the need to do more with less, again, that might not be surprising to a lot of you. On the other hand, misery loves company. You’re not the only one feeling the heat… more than 2/3 of survey respondents are feelin’ it too.
It’s a matter of Control AND Flexibility. Survey respondents said that they want to improve financial control in the process… and they wanted to improve end user flexibility to prepare a better budget. Overwhelming they said they wanted both. Now before you conclude that you can’t have your cake and it eat too; I think the underlying desire is to provide flexibility in a controlled environment – and that is an achievable goal.
Excel is the most widely used application for budgeting. Approximately two thirds of respondents said they’re using Excel for budgeting; about 10% are using whatever their ERP system has to offer, and the rest are using a combination of purpose-built third party tools or something home grown.
Now since the majority of organizations surveyed are using Excel for budgeting, we filtered the results so we could see exactly what’s going on there. For example, the survey revealed that among those organizations using Excel for budgeting:
The Chief Complaint of Finance: "The mechanics take too much time, and they don’t have enough time for analysis." A close second was “Department heads hate the budget process. They simply do not put enough thought into it”.
The Chief Complaint of Department Heads : “I do not recognize the final budget number as mine.” That was followed very closely by “The budget templates do not let me budget the way I think.” These complaints are the flip side to Finance’s complaint that the department heads hate the process and don’t put enough thought into it.
The Chief Complaint of the Sr. Executives: “The budget does not tie to the strategy”. Forgive me, but if the budget doesn’t tie to the strategy, what does it tie to? Scary thought.
What does it all mean? That’s what the whitepaper is all about. You’ll get the demographics of who participated; see the detailed results for each specific question, and a clear headed assessment of the implications for redesigning the budget process. You can use the link at the top of the page, or simply click here to pre-order your copy.
Now, if you’d like to add your voice, we’d welcome you to take the survey yourself. It takes less than 10 minutes to complete, and you’ll even get a chance to win an iPad 2 if you do.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XLerantBudgetSurvey
As always, your comments are welcomed, please feel free to post them below.
Lawrence Serven
Founder
XLerant, Inc.
www.XLerant.com