Chris Ortega and Zachary Rael explain why rolling forecasts beat annual budgets for decision-making. A traditional budget gives false confidence as a checklist, while forecasts let you adjust as conditions change. Alignment between strategy and numbers matters more than the plan itself.
Budgeting for our clients is a checklist and it's a false sense of confidence. For me, I think budgeting is for the SMB space. Client checklist, here's where we're gonna go. Budgeting is just where we wanna directionally go. Rolling forecasting is gold standard.
Meet Chris Ortega and Zachary Rael. Chris is fractional CFO at Fresh FP&A, bringing over 20 years of experience scaling and exiting companies. Zachary is VP of Finance and Operations.
Zach, if I was to ask you, what's the purpose of the budgeting process? How do you think about it?
An annual budget is the plan that you're putting together for what you believe is going to be true and going to happen over the course of the next 12 months and what you need to do to execute and make that work.
We all hear top-down, bottom-up, lots of different methods. Any advice on how to do it? How I think the key is to be intentional. to think about kind of that forecasting and things that have worked well for you?
For us, what it comes down to
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