9th Annual Conference ‘Corporate Budgeting. Best practices from leading industry experts’ CFO-Russia

On September 25, 2020, Nina Novikova, a visiting lecturer of the School of Finance, Executive Director of INTERA, participated as a speaker in the 9th Annual Conference ‘Corporate Budgeting. Best Practices from Leading Industry Experts’ organized by CFO-Russia.

The event was devoted to the discussion of the problems of the effectiveness of budgeting, modeling, forecasting in a period of uncertainty, discussion of new requirements to the personnel of financial and economic divisions and their interaction with business divisions in conditions of the need for close interaction and a significant influence of external factors.

A fairly broad topic was discussed at the conference while maintaining the general focus of the discussions - how to act during changes, when new crises and challenges are inevitable, and the variability of the environment vividly raises the question of the applicability of traditional methods of budgeting, investment activities, and risk leveling.

Participants actively shared their experience:

• of building an effective budgeting system and choosing between investments for growth and budgeting "for survival";
• of abandoning the annual budget and introducing alternative cash management mechanisms;
• of the use of information technologies in the preparation of a budget  - from the choice of the optimal software to the feasibility of using software robots for routine work with big data and balancing the workload of employees of financial and economic services (FES);
• of the risk management for budget preparation and follow-up control;
• of organization of interaction between FES and business units during budget preparation: prioritization, pros and cons of "good" relationships, focus on relevant areas that form the main income and expenses of the company, etc.

The report by Nina Novikova was devoted to several issues of company management which make it possible to feel confident in the conditions of high dynamics and the company's dependence on external factors:

• integrated planning as a multipurpose tool that allows you to control the risk of profitability reduction, ensure teamwork and the interest of all divisions of the company both in the planning process and further in operational activities;
• an integrated system of prompt response and adjustment of indicators: work with standardization of processes and optimization of resources, stocks, costs, cash flow.