Course Description

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.

In this course, Rob Stephens will start by outlining the benefits and challenges of budgeting. Throughout this course Rob will provide tips and alternative budget systems that can mitigate these challenges and capture more benefits.

Rob will 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 alternative 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.

Note: This course is part of a three-part series "Better Budgeting." The three parts are:

• The Master Budget and Sub-Budgets
• The Budgeting Process
• Budgeting alternatives (this course)

The individual courses can be taken on their own (links above) or as part of the full course HERE

Learning Objectives

• Identify budgeting benefits and challenges
• Recall the differences between traditional costing and activity-based costing
• Recognize the pros and cons of budgeting alternatives

Prerequisites

• None