“Budgeting is no longer a once-a-year activity.” - Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, The One Minute Manager Having a great well-planned out budgetary process in place and working will assist the leaders of any organisation to live their business model and make their wildest entrepreneurial dreams come true. This is where a GREAT accountant comes in. Your job is to help your clients adopt a well-planned out well defined practical budgetary process that makes sense in their specific organisation. This will enable your client’s leadership team to ensure that their vision for the future is executed and that they will measure what is working and what is not. And your client will thank you for all the positive results that are achieved through this process. In order to be able to do this you will have to remind your client that the key to a great budgeting process is establishing the discipline to set up a plan and then following the process to make sure everyone in the organisation actually adheres to that plan. An effective budget and realistic plan builds accountability while empowering employees to do what they do best. Budgeting is much too important to leave to your clients to do by themselves. Think of the current clients you have. How many of them would appreciate you stepping in and offering them an add on service to help them implement and reap the rewards of a great budgeting process? It’s a no-brainer upsell that you could offer to most of your clients - and they’ll thank you for it. Budgeting is much too important to simply see as another to-do (or even worse a not to-do) on the corporate checklist. The budget is a management tool for instilling discipline and accountability. Because the budget is only one step in a larger planning process, all the steps in planning must be successfully completed for a great budget to be produced. Many organisations invest 60 - 180 days in the planning process and, yet, produce a document that no one pays attention to or follows. That is how you want your clients NOT to do budgeting. By seeing the budget in the context of the integrated planning process and then teaching your client how to do everything they can to make sure the four elements of a budget are working in their organisation, their leadership team will produce a vision for the future that is actually executed every day in employees’ decisions and actions. Even better, incorporating the discipline of high-road budgeting and integrated planning will guarantee that all employees are doing the right things for all the right reasons. And you get to work with a client that produces increased productivity, profitability and results. And now you can actually use the budget to add extra value to all the other engagements you perform for this client. It’s a win-win-win.