As budgeting issues are : Delayed budget projectionsOver flowProposed solutionOperational requirementsPlease outline and prepare an Executive Briefing of possible improvements to the budgetary process targeted and include at least two (2) recommendations for each issue

Background information: The current budgeting and financial planning procedure has a step named 'Produce the master budget'. This requires consolidation of all approved subsidiary budgets, which is a task performed by your team in the finance department. Your team has never been able to produce the master budget by the deadline date for the following reasons: Delayed budget projections: The department managers rarely have their preliminary budget projections submitted to the Budget Committee on time. Consequently, the Budget Committee usually must delay its review of all the subsidiary budgets by about two weeks. Over flow: The two-week delay puts enormous pressure on the finance department as the production of the master budget overlaps with other scheduled finance department tasks such as GST activity reporting, payroll preparation and asset register updates. Proposed solution: The finance staff feel that the budget cycle should commence two weeks earlier, but if this were implemented it would clash with the stocktake period in the retail outlets. Operational requirements: The budget consolidation is performed manually by entering information from hard copy forms into a database. It would require a major financial systems upgrade to provide department managers with the ability to enter this information directly. You do some research and find that if the department managers entered their forecast budget data into a standard spreadsheet template, it would then be relatively simple to export data from this format into the financial system for budget consolidation. This approach would require resources for setting up the spreadsheet templates and training department managers in using the spreadsheet templates