For years, finance teams have invested in technology to make budgeting more efficient. Yet despite advances in automation, the budgeting process itself has remained remarkably resistant to change. According to the Association for Financial Professionals, organizations take an average of 8.7 weeks to produce a budget, essentially unchanged from 8.5 weeks three years earlier.
Finance teams have focused so heavily on speeding up budget collection and consolidation that they’ve overlooked a more fundamental challenge: helping business leaders understand the decisions driving the numbers.
As organizations prepare for another year of financial planning, they have an opportunity to rethink budgeting altogether. Instead of focusing on accelerating the collections process, finance teams should focus on helping business leaders understand the financial impact before those decisions are finalized.
The problem with collecting numbers
Historically, budgeting has followed a familiar pattern. Department heads submit projections, finance validates assumptions and consolidates the information, and only then can teams evaluate how individual decisions affect the broader financial picture.
This places finance in the position of collecting and translating information rather than helping shape decisions. Meanwhile, business leaders are responsible for their budgets without always having the visibility needed to understand financial trade-offs.
At AMAG Retail, part of Switzerland’s largest Volkswagen Group dealership organization, this challenge became unmanageable. As the company transitioned toward decentralized planning, responsibility for preparing budgets shifted to the individual cost center owners. Yet, the process still relied on Excel files, with each planning cycle generating around 400-500 separate workbooks.
The problem wasn’t just the volume. It was the disconnect between the people making operational assumptions and their ability to translate what those assumptions meant financially.
Giving department leaders responsibility for their numbers is only half the job. If they submit plans in separate spreadsheets and finance can’t see the full picture until everything is reconciled, the process hasn’t changed.
Finance and the business need to work through the numbers together as the plan takes shape. A unified planning model lets department leaders change a sales forecast or expense and see the impact on costs and margins before committing. Finance sees those changes roll up across the business as they happen, so teams can evaluate the financial impact and make adjustments before decisions are finalized.
The real value of a shorter budget cycle
To address these challenges, AMAG Retail implemented Acterys Planning Intelligence, replacing hundreds of disconnected Excel workbooks with a connected planning environment. Rather than collecting individual budgets and consolidating them after the fact, the company gave cost center owners the ability to enter operational assumptions directly into a shared planning model and see their financial implications in real time.
The results were significant: its budgeting cycle dropped from approximately two months to one, while users gained the ability to see how changes to their assumptions affected metrics, like gross margin, within seconds.
But the more meaningful transformation was how the finance team could use that time differently.
Rather than managing inputs, controllers could spend more time coaching cost-center owners, many of whom lacked deep financial expertise. This allowed finance to help colleagues strengthen their assumptions and better understand the consequences of their decisions.
In Reto’s experience, this shift improved budget quality despite reducing the time required to produce it. It illustrates why efficiency should be the starting point for financial transformation, not the ultimate measure of success.
Three ways to make planning more valuable
1. Give business leaders financial visibility, not just budget ownership
Decentralizing planning should involve more than asking department heads to submit numbers. They also need the ability to understand how operational decisions translate into financial outcomes.
At AMAG Retail, teams can model the impact of selling 100 additional vehicles and immediately understand the resulting financial implications. Connecting operational assumptions to financial drivers allows business owners to evaluate trade-offs before submitting their plans.
2. Turn controllers into coaches, not collectors
Reducing administrative work gives finance an opportunity to contribute more directly to business decisions. But it also requires different skills.
Beyond traditional financial expertise, controllers increasingly need stronger analytical, data-modeling and communication skills. Their value comes from both producing accurate figures and helping colleagues interpret them and make informed decisions.
Finance leaders should measure success not only by time saved, but by whether their teams are spending more time strengthening assumptions and improving financial understanding across the business.
3. Build planning processes that can adapt as conditions change
An annual budget reflects a business at a particular moment. As conditions change, finance must be able to evaluate alternative scenarios without rebuilding plans from scratch.
In automotive retail, shifting conditions can require management to understand the earnings impact of changing sales assumptions within hours. Supporting that speed requires connected data, consistent financial logic and flexible modeling.
Before finance can rely on artificial intelligence for better forecasts, it needs to understand what those forecasts are built on. Every planning process has inputs, calculations and outputs, but in many organizations those pieces are spread across finance, sales and operations, with different definitions and business rules. AI won’t make those inconsistencies disappear.
Finance needs a common foundation that connects operational drivers to financial results, with consistent calculations and controls over how changes are made and approved. Then AI can help evaluate scenarios and show what a change in sales or capacity means for margins and cash flow, with results finance can trace back and trust.
Without that foundation, even sophisticated analytics cannot reliably deliver the insights decision-makers need.
Better planning begins with better decisions
Cutting a budgeting cycle in half is meaningful, but the bigger opportunity lies in what finance does with the time it recovers.
When finance spends less time collecting numbers, it can devote more attention to improving assumptions, helping business leaders navigate trade-offs and adapting plans as conditions change.
The ultimate measure of a successful planning process isn’t how quickly finance finalizes a plan, but whether the process gives the business the insight and flexibility to make better decisions long after the budget is approved.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Mike Zack is general manager of Acterys, a Vena Solutions company, where he leads efforts to advance enterprise financial and operational planning. A seasoned financial technology executive, Mike previously held leadership roles at UBS, GTreasury and Hazeltree. He holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting and finance from Northern Illinois University and an MBA in strategic management from the University of Notre Dame.
Reto Haupt leads retail controlling at AMAG Retail and is passionate about making financial planning simpler, more integrated and more data-driven. His work includes the implementation and continuous development of Acterys and Power BI for planning and reporting.
Photo credit: magnific/Freepik
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