Your Planning Model Is Planning for Last Year's Company
By Charlie Liu ·
If your planning model hasn't been touched since last year's budget, it's planning for a company that doesn't exist anymore.
Think about the last 12 months. A new entity. New GL accounts. New hires, and a few people who left but still have logins. A department that quietly moved its numbers into a spreadsheet sitting next to the model.
Your business moved. Your model didn't.
Why week one of budget season feels like a fight
Most finance teams blame the system when the first week of budget season goes sideways. Templates go to the wrong people. Totals don't tie. Someone asks why their department is still on last year's structure.
In my experience, it's rarely the system. It's a year of drift. Every small change in the business that never made it into the model shows up at once, right when you have the least time to deal with it.
For a CFO, that drift shows up later as something worse: a budget nobody trusts.
A budget model review takes hours, not a rebuild
Don't boil the ocean. You don't need to rebuild anything. You need a few hours of checking before a single template goes out.
Here's the test I've run with finance teams for years. Six yes-or-no questions. Every yes is one point.
- Has the business added an entity, location or department the model doesn't have?
- Are there GL accounts in your ERP that don't map to the model?
- Can anyone who left the company still log in or approve a budget?
- Is any team keeping its plan in a separate spreadsheet?
- Are last year's assumptions (rates, headcount, growth) still hard-coded somewhere?
- Is there a budget template with no single named owner?
It takes two minutes. Be honest. Nobody's watching.
What your score means
Zero or one: you're in good shape. Send the templates.
Two or three: block an afternoon to fix the gaps before anything goes out.
Four or more: your model has drifted far enough that budget season will feel like a rebuild anyway. Better to fix the structure now than to patch it in December.
The scary part is never the score. It's the moment someone realizes the person who left in June can still approve budgets.
The one rule
If you can't name who owns each budget template, you're not ready to send them. Start there. Everything else on this list gets easier once every template has one name on it.
Scored four or more? We'll tell you where we'd start.
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