IDU NEWS

Stuck in spreadsheet hell?

Aug 22, 2019
2 min

Stuck in spreadsheet hell?

It’s time to upgrade your budgeting and forecasting process How long does it take your company to prepare its annual budget – two weeks? Six weeks? Two months? Three months? And on a scale of “walk in the park” to “swim through shark-infested waters”, how stressful is the process? If your answer is six weeks or longer, we’re betting the process is also stressful and unpleasant. For some human activities, a slower pace means more leisure and time to reflect; budgeting is NOT o

Outsourcing: Time to get off the production line

Sep 4, 2018
4 min

Outsourcing: Time to get off the production line

Outsourcing is hardly a new concept. It allows us to effectively hive off non-core, yet still important, activities and outcomes to a specialist service provider, freeing up a company’s time, and ideally also budget, to focus on what we specialise in. We gain both time and money: basically oil and gold today. But, like so many things, you can’t keep doing things the way they have always been done and expect to get better or different results. So, I wonder if it isn’t time to

Expense management: Honing the double-edged sword

Oct 17, 2017
3 min

Expense management: Honing the double-edged sword

Ironically, growth and success can be a double-edged sword for small and medium-sized businesses. On the one hand, you’re growing and hitting the milestones, which is a massive achievement, especially in today’s tough economy. On the other, quite quickly things that used to be simple and straightforward acquire added levels of complexity. All of a sudden, as the business owner or FD, you simply can’t be as hands-on and omniscient as you used to be. It’s pretty daunting giving

Size Does Matter

Jan 12, 2017
2 min

Size Does Matter

There is a perception that selecting a large brand name software supplier is the safe choice; that there are fewer risks involved. I’m here to tell you that size does matter, but not in the way you might expect. Let’s look at a large software supplier. In most cases, large suppliers mean large costs. Not because they necessarily can but because they have higher overheads – more staff, larger premises, bigger bills. As they grow – which they inevitably do – these overheads gro

Budgeting vs Planning

Oct 6, 2016
3 min

Budgeting vs Planning

CORPORATE PLANNING (BUDGETING) So why would I think of corporate planning as operational? Well, l largely because it drives the immediate future of the business, which could be thought of as the next one, two or maybe, at a push, three years. It is what the banks look to when arranging finance; it is what your managers look to when striving for bonuses. So it is operational in my view, which necessitates a high level of empowerment and ownership for your team of managers who