Budget Season Confessions: What Finance Teams Admitted About Planning for 2027

Ask finance professionals how they handle budgeting, and they’ll walk you through their best practices. Ask them what drives them crazy about it, and you’ll get the real story. 

During Velixo’s Budgeting in the Era of AI webinar, Natasha Sabelli, CPA, Velixo’s Finance Evangelist, set the slides aside and started asking questions: polls, chat prompts, and emojis. The answers were more honest than anyone expected, and not one was about formulas. Nobody confessed to struggling with a lookup or a financial model. Every confession was about what happens before anyone types a number into Excel. 

Here’s what finance teams admitted, and what Business Central teams can do about each one before the 2027 budget templates go out. 

Confession 1: “Money grows on trees," and other budget assumptions 

Natasha asked attendees to share one of their company’s objectives for 2027, and the chat filled up right away: grow revenue, improve margins, reach more customers. Then she asked what assumptions sat behind those objectives. The chat went quiet until one person offered, “Money grows on trees.” 

It got a laugh, partly because it isn’t far from how plenty of budgets get built. Every company has objectives, but very few have a set of assumptions that everyone actually shares. Sales expects conversion to improve, Marketing plans around its own growth rate, HR hires to its own timeline, and Operations assumes volume will arrive evenly across all twelve months. Each of those plans might hold up perfectly well on its own, but put them side by side and you’re looking at four different versions of 2027. 

Departments won’t land on the same assumptions by accident, so Finance has to put them on the table first. Before any template goes out, write the basics down in one log that every department can see: inflation, wage increases, FX, interest rates, volume growth, hiring and pricing, each with an owner. That way, when Operations plans for volume, it’s planning for the same volume Sales is counting on. 

The same thinking applies when the numbers come back. For any material line, ask the department for three things alongside it: why the money is being spent, when it will be spent, and what would change it. A line that reads “$85,000 for a second warehouse forklift, ordered in May, on hold if Q1 volume comes in under plan” tells you far more than $85,000 does, and it shows you exactly which assumption that spending depends on. 

Confession 2: “Everywhere," and where budgeting happens in silos 

Natasha asked attendees where budgeting happens in silos at their company. She was expecting a few department names. Instead, several people answered with some version of the same word: “Everywhere.” 

It makes sense once you picture how budget season starts for most department heads. Say you run the warehouse. One morning in October an email from Finance lands in your inbox with a template attached and a due date two weeks out. Nobody has told you what the company is aiming for in 2027, you weren’t part of any conversation about growth or hiring, and the assumptions are already baked into the template. Your job is to fill in the cells and send it back. So you copy last year’s numbers, add a bit for inflation, and move on with your day. Multiply that by every department, and you get a budget built in silos without anyone meaning to build one. 

Two changes help. First, have leadership state the 2027 objectives themselves in a short kickoff, so department heads hear the plan from the people who set it rather than from Finance trying to explain it in a template note. Second, before the templates go out, sit down with each department and look at the last three years of budget versus actual together. If Marketing has come in 20% under budget three years running, carrying the same number forward helps nobody, and that history starts a much better conversation than “please submit by the 15th.” 

Confession 3: Chasing department heads for their numbers 

When Natasha asked attendees about the worst part of budget season, you can probably guess what came near the top. Chasing department heads finished second, just behind version control. 

If you’ve been the one doing the chasing, you know how it goes. The templates went out two weeks ago, and the deadline was Friday. By Monday you have four back, one is half finished, and the operations director has replied to your third reminder with “Will get to it this week.” When the numbers finally arrive, they’re often last year’s figures with a percentage added, because whoever filled them in was doing it between meetings to get Finance off their back. 

Some of that chasing comes from deadlines that catch people by surprise. Agree on a week-by-week calendar at kickoff and publish it, so nobody first hears about the due date when the template shows up. The rest comes from asking questions people don’t want to answer. “What’s your equipment budget for 2027?” gets you a number, eventually, after a few reminders. “We expect production to grow 20%. Can our current equipment keep up?” gets you a conversation about which machines are near capacity, what a replacement would cost, how long the lead time is, and what happens if it arrives late. 

The same goes for headcount. Instead of “How many people do you need next year?”, try “If order volume grows 10%, where does your team feel it first?” People answer questions about their own work much faster than questions about Finance’s spreadsheet, and the answers tell you a lot more. 

Confession 4: “We don’t talk about it," and the budget version problem 

Version control topped the poll as the worst part of budget season. When Natasha followed up by asking how many versions of the budget workbook people usually end up with, one attendee answered, “We don’t talk about it.” 

Most Business Central teams know how that happens. In early October, someone exports actuals from Business Central, pastes them into the budget workbook and sends it out to six department heads, who each save their own copy and start editing. A week later, Sales sends theirs back with a new tab, and Operations has overwritten a formula. Then leadership asks for a $100,000 change to Marketing, so you make the change, save it as a new file, and email it around again. By approval day the folder has a file called FINAL-v8-approved-updated.xlsx, and nobody is completely sure it’s the right one. 

Better file names won’t fix that, because the problem is where the data lives. When actuals stay connected to Business Central, every workbook refreshes from the same G/L entries instead of from an export that was out of date the day after it was pulled. The same goes for the other end of the process. Decide before approval how the approved budget will get into Business Central’s G/L budgets, who will load it, and how revisions will follow, or someone will end up rekeying budget entries by hand during January close. With an Excel add-in like Velixo, teams build the budget in Excel and write it back to Business Central in bulk, so the version leadership approved is the same version the variance reports run against. 

Confession 5: “Before it’s even approved," and why budgets go stale so fast 

Natasha asked attendees when they feel their budget becomes outdated, and one answer won by a wide margin: before it’s even approved. 

That sounds bleak until you think back to the 2026 plan you signed off on last fall. Maybe someone key left in the spring and took half the project knowledge with them, or a big customer pushed their renewal back a quarter right when you were counting on it. Maybe tariffs moved your costs in a direction nobody had modeled. None of that made the budget a failure, because a budget was never meant to predict the year. Its job is to give you a plan you can adjust when the year doesn’t go the way you expected, and in 2026, it probably didn’t. 

So when an assumption breaks, Finance should be able to answer three questions quickly: what changed, where it flows through the plan, and what decision it triggers. Most teams handle the first two well enough and skip the third until a red variance forces the conversation in March. 

You can make that conversation easier by deciding some of the responses now, during budget season, while nobody is under pressure. If revenue comes in more than 10% below budget for two months in a row, maybe you reforecast the second half and pause discretionary hiring. If a key input cost runs 8% above your assumption for a full quarter, maybe you revisit pricing. Every company’s triggers will look different. What matters is that the response is agreed on before you’re staring at the variance, trying to figure out what it means. 

Confession 6: Natasha’s own confession is... skipping lunch 

The last confession is Natasha’s own. Earlier in her career, she ate lunch at her desk most days. Her reasoning made sense at the time: if she worked through lunch, she could leave at 6 instead of 7. 

Looking back, she says one lunch with the Operations manager would probably have saved her a lot more than an hour. Operations sees what moves a budget long before Finance does, like the machine that’s overdue for replacement, the supplier that keeps missing delivery dates, or the team that’s one resignation away from paying overtime every week. None of that shows up in a budget template, and it rarely comes up in a budget meeting, but there’s a good chance it comes up over a sandwich. So this budget season, close the laptop and go have lunch with your Operations manager. 

Your 2027 budget checklist: before you send the templates 

Here’s everything from the six confessions in one place, roughly in the order you’ll need it: 

Start with one page 

If that list feels like a lot, start with one thing: fill in a kickoff sheet and send it to your team before the templates go out. One page covering your 2027 objectives, core assumptions, calendar and who owns what will head off most of the confessions above before they happen. 

To make that easier, Natasha turned the webinar into a free guide, Set the Table for 2027: The Budgeting Guide. Along with a one-page 2027 Budget Kickoff Sheet, it includes a budget process health check, an assumption log, a question bank for the budget lines that cause the most grief, a roundtable agenda and a week-by-week budget calendar. It’s built to be filled in, not just read. 

Download Set the Table for 2027: The Budgeting Guide

And if you missed the session, you can watch Budgeting in the Era of AI: Setting Yourself Up for Success for 2027 Budgeting on demand.