Paul BarnhurstFP&A Expert Empowering Finance Professionals to Excel Everday

Your forecast must serve the business.

28 Aug 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief dialogue, Speaker A emphasizes that financial processes should not be performed merely for their own sake, but to extract meaningful value for the business. Speaker B reinforces the need to recognize the intended value of a process. Speaker A then reflects on experiences at small companies where a rolling forecast or monthly budgeting is implemented to keep up with a constantly changing business environment. However, they note that simply updating models each month without genuine engagement with the business can become a hollow exercise. The core question raised is how to strike the right balance between frequent, data‑driven forecasting and meaningful interaction with business stakeholders to ensure the forecast truly serves the organization.

You don't go through a process for the sake of doing a process.
You've got to recognize what the value is you're trying to take out of it.
And I've also been at small companies where you're trying to go over and just do a rolling forecast or budget and you're like, okay, you know what, we're going to do something every single month because the business is constantly changing. But then at the same time, all you're doing is you're just updating your models and you're not really engaging with the business either. So how do you find the right balance through that?
To start out with, the big thing is identifying who your key players are and what people want out of this budget, right? And going from there. I remember I joined an organization and it drove me wild for the first like 2 months I was there, everybody was like, we do our monthly reporting and I'd say like, okay, sales was supposed to do this number and they're like, we should move on. I'd be like, that's your number. He's like, no, that's the finance number. And what I did when I got full control over the budget and forecasting the business was I just sat down with the CRO and was like, what do you wish the forecast and the budget told you about your team? And we built the budget, the forecast in that way.