Budgeting Cost Control & Cost Reduction

A budget fails for one of two reasons. It was negotiated rather than built, so nobody believes the numbers and padding is the only rational response. Or it was built well and then never used, because the variance report arrives too late and explains the past instead of changing anything. This week covers both: constructing a budget from drivers rather than from last year plus a percentage, and running the control cycle so a variance produces a decision. Cost reduction is treated separately and honestly, because much of what is called cost reduction is deferral, and the difference shows up a year later.

It runs 7 times over the published calendar, in 6 cities and live online. Every date is the same programme with the same content and the same certificate.

• Build a budget from activity drivers, and show which assumption each number depends on.
• Challenge a submission without losing the relationship with the person who made it.
• Run a variance analysis that separates price, volume and efficiency.
• Distinguish a cost reduction from a deferral, and say which one is being proposed.
• Reforecast mid year without restarting the whole exercise.

Budget holders and cost centre managers, finance business partners who build and challenge budgets, and financial controllers responsible for the cycle.

Short input, then work. Across 5 days of roughly 6 teaching hours each, the balance sits deliberately with the second: a programme where the trainer talks for six hours produces notes rather than capability.

• Your own material

  Exercises run on situations delegates bring, not on a case study written for a different organisation in a different decade.

• A capped cohort

  Small enough that everybody is asked something. Executive programmes are capped tighter still.

• Practice under scrutiny

  The difficult conversation, the challenged assumption, the decision defended out loud. Judgement is not built by watching.

• Something to take back

  Each day ends with a thing you can use on Monday rather than a slide deck you will not reopen.

• A driver based budget for one of the delegate's own cost centres.
• A variance report redesigned so each line points at an owner and a decision.
• A cost reduction list separated into permanent, deferred, and not actually reduction.

A GATI certificate recording what you attended, issued after the programme has run and attendance has been taken. Attending at least 80 per cent of the days earns a certificate of completion; attending less earns a certificate of attendance stating exactly what was attended.

Every certificate carries a code that anybody can check against GATI's own record, which is what makes it worth holding. It records participation. This site will not imply one it does not have.