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My budgets are all unrealistic but at least it forces my staff to be hours conscience and not spend 40 hours in cash. Good to have some sort of benchmark...then you just track your variances and tell partner - sorry but that's how much it took to finish this or that. It helps to then try to bill for overruns when you know exactly what pain areas were
The key thing is to communicate BEFORE you are over budget this also helps to actually bill the client for the unexpected situations because the conversation can happen on the front end. It also helps get budgets more realistic in the future.
Eating hours is part of the reason the budget is so unrealistic. People do it year after year and then suddenly the budget is super low. I always tell people to charge all their time. Also, my team documents reasons for overages since a lot of them are client related.
Never eat hours
I once saw the budget the manager was given by the partner and it was way bigger than the budget the manager gave us.
@EY 1 - when people eat hours year after year, how are you supposed to break that cycle? If you're the first to charge all your hours, your manager automatically assumes you're inefficient because everyone before you got the work done in less time.
I constantly updated the managers, senior managers and partners know what is taking so long. They only will think you're inefficient if you don't communicate delays throughout the time. Also, if you're making an effort to significantly improve the workpaper, it's expected.
I don't really understand the point of a budget. It's not accurate most of the time and every year you could run into some unique problem in one area that would completely throw it off.
Some managers never shut up about it while others never really mention it. That should be telling about its ultimate importance.
This sounds like a classic case where someone in the pipeline budgeted to the fee instead of budgeting for what the job really requires hours wise. Our world would be so much simpler if everyone budgeted based on actuals YOY.
#someonewantstohavegreatrealization