BBRT Urges Companies to Rethink Annual Budget Process

Natick, MA – March 13, 2014 –Centage™ Corporation, a leading provider of budgeting and forecasting software (Budget Maestro™) for small and medium sized businesses, today announced the first in a four part webinar series featuring Steve Player, Program Director for the Beyond Budgeting Round Table (BBRT) North America, to explore, “Slowing Down to Go Fast (Moving away from the pain of annual budgets).” The webinar, to be held Wednesday, March 26th at 2:00pm EDT/ 11:00am PDT, will highlight the seven most common challenges with traditional budgeting processes and educate attendees on what they can do to overcome these challenges.Quick links:

• “Slowing Down to Go Fast (Moving away from the pain of annual budgets)”
• Wednesday, March 26th at 2:00 p.m. EDT/11:00 a.m. PDT
• Click here to register (we will provide a link to a recording of the live event for everyone who registers)

The valley between the rush of year end activities and beginning of the annual budget process is the ideal time to evaluate ways to avoid the pain of annual budgeting. It is also a great time to rethink the planning process to more effectively set targets, control activities, drive greater accountability and higher performance. Doing so often requires finance to slow down, to go fast. The webinar will illustrate how the traditional budgeting process drives sub-optimal behavior, is full of conflicts of interests, and ultimately is built on many assumptions that are completely outside of the control of the organization. More importantly, this webinar will offer attendees useful strategies on what they can do to overcome these issues.This webinar will help attendees better understand:

• The seven common budgeting problems
• Planning best practices to overcome traditional budgeting process
• How to move from cumbersome spreadsheets to an integrated planning system
• How to help your organization become Future Ready
• Case examples from organizations that are already changing

Guest speaker Steve Player is the co-author (with Steve Morlidge) of Future Ready: How to Master Business Forecasting (Wiley, 2010) and the co-author (with Jeremy Hope) of Beyond Performance Management (Harvard Business School Press, 2012). Steve’s work has recently been featured in CFO Magazine, Entrepreneur, and the Journal of Accountancy.