• Speed up planning cycle

As you approach budget planning for the New Year, you will need to be flexible enough to accommodate everything. Since new things are always set to emerge, you cannot develop a budget and forget it. Rather, your budget must accommodate new ideas and changes that keep coming up on the way as you move on. Planning is an important aspect that needs to be given the utmost attention. As such, the planning cycle needs to be hastened since doing so will make the process of analyzing, adjusting, and implementing plans successful and able to navigate the changing business landscape. Achieve this by setting up annual plans, quarterly, monthly reviews, and speeding up time to market your products or services.  

• Understand ROI

In everything you do, you would want to understand how it is giving you a return on investment. Going to a new year, this will be important than ever before. With the uncertainty that all industries live on, understand the impact of every item or line of items. Invest in analytics to enable you to track outcomes and manage data from disparate systems. Investing in analytics will help you to track revenue and study patterns. This will help you to make decisions that are based on information.

• Assign budgeting talent to be high priority areas

The coronavirus pandemic has affected the operations and configuration of teams at an unprecedented pace. It has also altered the reporting needs as companies must report at much shorter intervals than they did before. With the shorter reporting cycles, there is a need for better budgeting and planning decisions. Looking at 2021, you will have to come up with a bigger team of budgeting professionals to tackle high-priority problems, unlike in the past when a small squad could have solved the budgeting issues. Take advantage of digital tools to reduce pressure from the finance teams.

• Understand priorities

As a business person, it is always crucial to be prepared to adjust your budgets when the need arises. In 2021, prepare to alter your budget based on the changes that take place in the marketplace. Understand the business activities that are essential against those that you can afford to live without. Begin by identifying what makes certain things more important than others. This can be understood by assessing the return on investment of a specific activity. Create a system that helps you understand activities that are critical than others and review them regularly.

• Plan to change plans

At times like these, where there are many market uncertainties, there are various challenges that emerge on the way. This demands that you stay ready at all times to tackle these challenges as they arise. You can achieve this by developing a flexible budget that can accommodate emerging issues. While it is crucial to design a flexible budget, resist the possibility of budgeting for things that are irrelevant to your business.