Marketing budget nightmare with a spreadsheet
In September, you will surely start again this infernal circle that is the creation…
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In September, you will surely start again this infernal circle that is the creation of your budget for next year. For many of you, this means consolidating disparate data (ERP Finance, spreadsheets, various databases and even emails). And a lot of coffee and evenings spent in the office.
And that’s just the beginning of the nightmare!
The classic budgeting process of a multinational company
For planning purposes, the exercise generally begins 4 months before the start of the next fiscal year, when the Group asks each subsidiary for its projected budget.
Each subsidiary does the exercise in its corner based on the budget spent on the current year (not completed) and the projection for the next year. And generally sends back a spreadsheet with its figures. First consolidation exercise at Group Marketing level.
Discussions with the Finance department lead to arbitration and we set off on a series of back-and-forth meetings, on the one hand between group marketing and local marketing, and on the other hand between group marketing and group finance.
Once the budgets were set, the process repeated itself every month: local marketing submitted the expenses, which were consolidated at the group level, which sent them to Group Finance, which itself received the consolidated figures from local finance… and the figures did not match!
Hence the hours spent looking for the discrepancy…
The main problems with spreadsheet-based budgets
Consolidation of budgets is complicated
In the example above, a multinational company with about 30 countries to manage is not extraordinary. If we add that there are sometimes individual budgets per channel (web, events, emailing, content….) this can represent more than a hundred tables to consolidate. So many manual copy – paste operations and formulas (ah research….) subject to .
