I’ve just received the annual budget for the team that I manage, and it’s a frightful squeeze. It’s completely unfeasible if I plan on actually getting our job done and it has a ton of errors in it!
Every budget in recent memory has been tighter than the one preceding it, but this one is just too tight.
Talking to my colleagues, I discovered that other operational departments are in the same spot; financial decisions affecting their departments are also made by the Finance department without consultation. Not liaising with any other department might explain some of the errors. It must be just as tough for other managers if this is how budgeting works across the board.
I want to engage with the finances of my department more than I can now, but I just can’t see a path for me to do that (at least not with the current way of doing things). As it stands, I’ve resorted to tracking my department’s budget myself, on my own spreadsheets, because I can’t trust the mistake-riddled figures from Finance.
I’ve tried arranging regular meetings between Finance and my department as a possible solution, or at least as a starting point to gradually build information sharing processes. However, all too often, these meetings seem to go absolutely nowhere. There just aren’t enough people in the organisation who are bothering to engage with the issue to build momentum for change.
I’d like to say I have a better solution, but I’m stuck for solid ideas. In an ideal world, there’d be a prescribed way for Finance to consult each department, so they could stop messing up our budgets.
Maybe open lines of communication will eventually help give the budgeting team insight into our needs, and help make it clear to us why unrealistic financial limits are being imposed, but it feels like too little and too late. Without getting everyone to wake up and at least notice the problem, I fear that the budget squeeze will simply continue until we’re squeezed out entirely.
