Better Budgeting: Budgeting Alternatives

Budgeting consumes a massive amount of time and resources. It's a stressful and busy time. Are there ways to improve the effectiveness of the investment we make in the budget process? Can we make better budgeting decisions that lead to higher performance?

There are options within and beyond traditional budgeting. Each company should consider these options and decide which could improve their budgeting process. Budgeting has many benefits that we can continue to capture and build upon.

This course starts by outlining the benefits and challenges of budgeting. Throughout this course, I'll provide tips and alternative budget systems that can mitigate these challenges and capture more benefits. I'll explore a series of budgeting alternatives. We'll look at rolling forecasts, zero-based budgeting, activity-based budgeting, and many others. We'll also look at operating without a budget.

Each alternative has pros and cons that I'll list. Each lesson in this section gives an overview of the budget alternatives to help you decide whether you want to pursue that alternative further. Even if you don't fully adopt these alternatives, you can find ideas to improve your budgeting process.

The course concludes by revisiting budgeting process challenges and how the tips and alternatives presented in the course can address or mitigate those challenges.

This course is part of a three-part series I call Better Budgeting. The three parts are:
• The master budget and sub-budgets
• The budgeting process
• Budgeting alternatives

You can watch all three parts in the order above or watch any part as a stand-alone course. You can also view the Better Budgeting course to view all three in one course.

The course author has been the CFO, SVP of Finance, or Director of Operations of companies with just a few employees to companies with $3 billion in assets and hundreds of employees. He's led, facilitated, or participated in the budgeting process many times.