What Finance Teams Told Us About Budget Season, and What It Means for 2027
By Natasha Sabelli, CPA: Not Your Typical CPA | Big 4 Audit & Controller Experience | Professional Yapper About Finance, Tax, Tech & Everything in Between | Finance Evangelist @Velixo & Founder @NatSab
I recently hosted Part 1 of Velixo’s Budgeting in the Era of AI series, and I did something I’d recommend to anyone presenting to finance people:
I stopped talking and asked questions.
Polls, chat, hand emojis, the whole thing.
And honestly, the answers told me more than my slides did.
Not one of the biggest frustrations people shared was about formulas, financial models or Excel skills. They were about everything that happens before anyone types a number into the spreadsheet.
- Version control.
- Chasing department heads.
- Unrealistic assumptions.
- Budgets that are outdated before they’re even approved.
I’m not going to recap the whole thing slide by slide. That’s what the recording is for, and I promise I’m even more fun at 1.5x speed. Instead, here’s what finance teams told us, and what I’d change before your 2027 budget season gets too far underway.
“We don’t talk about it.”
My first poll asked about the worst part of budget season.
Version control came out on top, with chasing department heads and unrealistic assumptions close behind.
Then I asked how many versions of the budget workbook people usually end up with.
My favourite answer?
“We don’t talk about it.”
But version control isn’t really a file-naming problem.
By the time the budget gets approved, nobody is entirely sure which “final” is actually final. The fix has to start before the templates go out, with one source of truth everyone works from. That means keeping actuals connected to the ERP instead of exporting and pasting them into Excel every cycle, and treating the load back into the ERP as part of the process once the budget is approved, not something you get to later.
If a $100K change to Marketing no longer produces FINAL-v8-approved-updated.xlsx, you’re already making progress.
“It’s outdated before it’s even approved.”
I also asked when people felt their budget became outdated, and one answer won by a lot: before it’s even approved. That sounds depressing, but I think it’s realistic.
Your 2027 budget will be wrong, and if you want proof, look back at 2026. Think about the plan you signed off on last fall. Maybe a key person left in the spring and took half the project knowledge with them. Maybe a big customer pushed their renewal back a quarter, or tariffs moved your costs in a direction nobody modeled. Somewhere along the way, AI probably changed how a team works faster than the plan could keep up. None of that meant the budget was a failure. It was never supposed to predict the future perfectly, and the real goal is a process that can adjust intelligently when reality changes.
When an assumption breaks, Finance should be able to answer three questions quickly:
- What changed?
- Where does it flow through the plan?
- What decision does it trigger?
That last question is the one most teams skip. Instead of waiting until March to argue about what a variance means, decide some of your triggers during budget season. Say revenue comes in more than 10% below budget for two months in a row. What happens next? Maybe you reforecast H2, pause discretionary hiring, or review certain spending.
Every company’s triggers will look different. What matters is deciding on the response before you’re staring at a red variance wondering what to do about it.
Objectives came fast. Assumptions didn’t.
This might have been my favourite part of the webinar. I asked everyone to share one of their company’s objectives for 2027, and the chat filled up almost immediately: grow revenue, increase margins, reach more customers. Then I asked what assumptions were sitting behind those objectives, and the chat got a lot quieter. One person answered, “Money grows on trees,” which isn’t that far off from what some budgets assume.
Most companies have plenty of goals. Where things fall apart is turning those goals into a shared set of assumptions. Marketing plans around one growth rate while Sales counts on conversion improving. HR builds to a certain hiring timeline, and Operations expects volume to land evenly across the year. Each of those might be completely reasonable on its own, but put them side by side and you could be looking at four different versions of 2027.
Finance can’t expect every department to land on the same assumptions by accident, so write them down. Before anyone opens a budget template, agree on the basics:
- Inflation
- Wage increases
- FX
- Interest rates
- Volume growth
- Hiring assumptions
- Pricing
That gives you one set of assumptions everyone can see. Then, when a department submits a material number, ask for three things alongside it: why the money is being spent, when it will actually happen, and what event or assumption would cause it to change. With a why, a when, and a trigger next to it, that number tells you much more than a figure sitting in a cell.
Nobody said the math was too hard
Look back at all of those answers. Nobody said budgeting was difficult because the calculations were too hard. When I asked where budgeting happens in silos today, several people answered with some version of “everywhere,” and that summed up the session for me.
Most budgeting problems begin before anyone enters a number into Excel. They start with unclear goals and assumptions nobody agreed on. Departments get pulled in too late, information stays locked inside individual teams, and deadlines come as a surprise until Finance starts chasing everyone down.
That’s why a more complicated model probably won’t fix it, and people and process are a better place to start. Get department heads in the room before the templates go out, and have leadership communicate the objectives themselves instead of leaving Finance to interpret them. Sit down with each department and review the last few years of budget versus actual. If Marketing has come in 20% under budget every year, carrying the same number forward isn’t helping anyone.
It also helps to change the questions Finance asks. Instead of “What’s your equipment budget for 2027?”, try “We’re expecting production to increase 20%. Can our existing equipment support that?” The first question gets you a number, while the second starts a conversation about capacity, timing, lead times, quotes, dependencies, and risk. That’s what you need to build a budget that holds up.
And while we’re at it, go have lunch with your Operations manager. I used to eat at my desk because I thought it meant I could leave at 6 instead of 7. Looking back, that lunch probably would have saved me a lot more than an hour.
Don’t just read about it. Start it.
After the webinar, the last thing I wanted was for people to close the tab, think “that was interesting,” and go right back to the same budgeting process. I wanted them to leave having actually started their 2027 budget, so we took the framework from the session and turned it into something practical.
Set the Table for 2027: The Budgeting Guide includes:
- a budget process health check
- a question bank for the budget lines that usually cause the most grief
- an assumption log
- a one-page 2027 Budget Kickoff Sheet
- a budget roundtable agenda
- a week-by-week budget calendar
It’s designed to help with everything that happens around the model: the people, process, assumptions, and technology that determine whether your budget is still useful three months after it gets approved.
Download Set the Table for 2027: The Budgeting Guide →
And if you missed the original session, you can watch Budgeting in the Era of AI: Setting Yourself Up for Success for 2027 Budgeting here.
If you only do one thing after reading this, complete the Kickoff Sheet on page 13 and send it to your team before the templates go out. Then let me know what you’re changing this year, because I’d love to hear what works for you.
And, obviously, keep it FUNance.
Start your 2027 budget before you open Excel
Get the health check, question bank, assumption log, kickoff sheet, roundtable agenda, budget calendar and AI data checklist in one guide built to be filled in, not just read.
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