Citrin Cooperman is one of the nation’s largest professional service firms and the 19th largest CPA accounting firm in the US. It is also ranked the 28th largest technology consulting firm in the US by Accounting Today. Citrin Cooperman digital services include Microsoft, NetSuite, Salesforce, Vena, cybersecurity and more.
Our expert panelists include Larry Diamond and Dominic DiBernardo. Larry Diamond is the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Citrin Cooperman. His prior roles included Global CFO for Engine, Bloomberg Media, Interpublic Group (IPG), and interestingly, SVP Finance for Martha Stewart Brands. Dominic DiBernardo, known as Dom, is a partner and CPM practice leader at Citrin Cooperman. His prior roles included CEO, Chief Business Intelligence Officer, Operations Director, Financial Analyst and Data Analyst.
Following are key takeaways to this discussion. If you are interested in learning more, view the full webcast panel video archive video here.
Budgeting Types
- Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Budgeting: Top-down is a budget that’s been dictated from leadership down to the ranks or budget owners across the organization, where I look at bottom-up budgeting as being more collaborative.
- Zero-Based vs. Traditional Budgeting: Zero-based is when you start with a blank slate and you have to justify the spend every year. Traditional budgeting is you precede the budget with either the prior year results or the prior year budget.
- Driver-Based and Predictive Budgeting: Driver-based planning is where a customer turns to other metrics, like billing rates or yields, that are going to act as good drivers.
- Rolling Forecast vs. Static Budgeting: Rolling forecast nature allows you to be nimble and agile and kind of move with the speed of which your business is changing, the dynamics and variables are changing.
8 Annual Planning Best Practices
If you’re on a calendar year with a 12/31 year-end, then you’re probably starting to fill, and budgeting being a bit palpable. You need to start gearing up the organization and thinking about launching the process. You have to start thinking about what’s that corporate guidance. What are those guide rails that you’re going to have to put in place for the stakeholders or the budget owners to live within, right? They may still have their wish list and they may still come forward with a budget that needs further review and approval, but giving them guide rails is a good place to start. Here are 8 annual planning best practices:
- Start Early
- Set a Budget Calendar
- Set Corporate Guidance
- Use Historical Data
- Leverage Driver Based Budgeting
- Make it Collaborative
- Communicate the Budget
- Adopt a Centralized Tool
How To Plan Right
How can we have the budget process be collaborative and yet not disruptive to everyone’s getting their job done? I think it’s really important to have your calendar to manage that and people kind of know when things are expected of them, but it should not be as consuming for the entire organization as it is for finance. And I think even for finance, it’s thinking about what are the drivers that will really matter and that we can really build upon to build a budget model that’s reliable, but we don’t get kind of just lost in the morass of the model and lose ourselves for three to four months doing nothing but budgeting.
Here are 11 keys to plan right:
- Assess current year-to-date performance
- Re-examine your long-range plan
- Finance & Leadership to issue budget calendar & budget guidance
- Annual kick-off call to review calendar, expectations, Q&A
- Collect input for next 15 months
- Layer in new initiatives
- Consider a top side hedge
- Summarize your plan and go “sell” it to the board
- Finalize your detailed planning
- Distribute finalized budgets to the business & start executing
- Make budgeting and forecasting an agile, ongoing process
Financial Dashboard Best Practices and Examples
To learn more budgeting and planning, along with financial dashboard best practices and examples and corporate performance management (CPM), view the complete webcast panel here.
ABOUT THE SPONSOR:
Citrin Cooperman is one of the nation’s largest professional service firms and the 19th largest CPA accounting firm in the US. It is also ranked the 28th largest technology consulting firm in the US by Accounting Today. Citrin Cooperman digital services include Microsoft, NetSuite, Salesforce, Vena, cybersecurity and more. For more information, visit www.CitrinCooperman.com.
