23-page budget season workbook

Your 2027 budget will be wrong. Make it useful anyway.

Set the Table for 2027

Most annual budget planning goes wrong before anyone opens Excel. Budgets end up outdated before they’re even approved, usually because of goals nobody wrote down, assumptions nobody agreed on, and departments that got involved too late. Natasha Sabelli, CPA, built this workbook to fix all of that before a single template goes out. Every page is a worksheet you fill in.

  • Score last year’s budget cycle out of 24 and find out exactly where it broke
  • Send one Kickoff Sheet so every department builds from the same version of 2027
  • Get the questions to ask behind headcount, CAPEX, travel and AI tool requests
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Set the Table for 2027 annual budget planning workbook by Velixo, showing the cover, budget process health check and Kickoff Sheet pages

Inside the workbook

Annual budget planning, done before the templates go out

Set the Table for 2027: The Budget Planning Workbook

Leadership wants 20% growth. Finance sends the templates. Sales asks for six more reps, Marketing wants another $500K, Engineering needs $1M for R&D. Each request might be reasonable, and none of them is tied to the 20%. Finance asks everyone to cut 15%, the budget gets approved, and three months later March revenue is 27% below plan. The problem started back in October, when the budget was built around numbers instead of the assumptions behind them.

This workbook covers the people, process and technology behind annual budget planning: everything that decides whether your budget is still worth opening in March. Work through it in order, or jump straight to the worksheets. Every chapter ends with something you can do this week. If you only do one thing, fill in the Kickoff Sheet on page 14.

  • A “what’s changed since last year” worksheet to fill in before you touch the old file
  • A 12-question health check that tells you which chapter to start with
  • A question bank and an assumption log, so every material line has a why, a when and a trigger
  • A one-page Kickoff Sheet, a roundtable agenda, and a 10-week calendar counted back from approval
  • Reforecast triggers and an AI data readiness checklist for when 2027 doesn’t go to plan