Blash Budgeting

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Budget season, without the spreadsheet chase

Every team answers the categories they own — training, events, software, equipment, subcontractors, headcount — on one screen, against one deadline. Hiring requests route through HR before they reach finance. And the consolidated monthly P&L for every company in the group is built the moment the last answer lands.

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The demo is read-only and entirely synthetic — invented companies, invented clients, invented people. No sign-up, no password, nothing to install.

What we are trying to fix

Nobody sets out to run a group budget on email and attachments. It happens because the first one was small enough, and every year since has been an edit of the last one — with a few more people to chase.

Nineteen people owe you a spreadsheet. Directorate heads, IT, purchase, procurement, marketing, HR — nine or ten categories, each owned by somebody who does not work for you. Some reply in your template, some in their own, some not at all.
You cannot tell a zero from a silence. “We have no training spend next year” and “nobody opened the file” produce the same empty column and the same zero in the P&L. Nothing anywhere says which one you are looking at.
The most expensive line is the one nobody priced. A department asks for four engineers and does not say what they cost. They think they submitted it; you think you received it; the budget is short four salaries and neither side can see the problem from where they sit.
Consolidating is a week of pasting, and then a deal slips. One master workbook per company, netted by hand, and every change upstream means doing the merge again. So the answer to “what does the year look like now” is always “give me until Friday”.
The one file everybody needs is the one nobody may see. Every department head’s budget sits in the same workbook as every salary. So the budget lives with finance, and every question about it has to go through finance.

Why this is not another planning tool

Most planning tools assume the numbers have already arrived, and give you a nicer grid to hold them. The hard part is the six weeks before that — getting nine categories out of twenty people and knowing what is still missing. This does the collection AND the calculation, which is why the two halves are worth having in one place.

One round, not nineteen emails

Finance opens the round once. Every team gets the categories they own — training, events, travel, software, equipment, subcontractors, infrastructure, intercompany work and headcount — on their own screen, against one deadline. You can see what is in, what is late and whose desk each thing is on, all year.

A nil return is an answer; a blank form is not

An area with nothing in it cannot be submitted without a written reason. That one sentence is the difference between a deliberate zero and a form nobody opened — and it is the single most common reason a budget comes in light.

Headcount goes through HR before it reaches finance

A department requests a POSITION, never a person. Submitting it raises a task addressed to whoever HR is, so it survives leave and handovers. HR sets the pay level; only then does finance see it to fund it. Until they do, the position is missing from the budget rather than guessed at — and the queue says so, with the money at risk beside it.

A request carries its own consequence

Gross profit and bench rate are measured against that company’s own thresholds before anybody argues. Failing does not block the request — it escalates it, with the failing figures frozen on it exactly as they stood at submission, so nobody can re-argue it later on numbers that have since moved.

Revenue is a register, not a target

Every contract with its client, value, status, probability and monthly schedule. The top line is the sum of those schedules and nothing else — so a deal nobody entered is revenue nobody has, and the difference between contracted, weighted and in-hand is on one screen.

You cannot hire against a deal you have not won

The hiring gate measures gross profit on committed work plus the pipeline at its stated probability — the same figures the department’s own page shows. In a spreadsheet you can move one cell from pipeline to committed and drop the probability haircut that way. Here the two are the same register, the gate reads it, and the committed-only margin sits beside the verdict.

The consolidation is finished when the last answer is in

Answers land as driver rows, not as pasted cells, and the engine computes every month of every company’s statement from them. Intercompany work is identified by counterparty and eliminated in its own column, in the open.

Every figure drills to the row that produced it

Open any number and you get the contracts, the people and the apportionment behind it. Provenance travels with the figure instead of living in somebody’s memory — which is what makes the budget defensible six months later.

It says what it is not sure about

Everything unanswered or unattached appears on one queue, ranked by the money it puts in doubt: a contract with no revenue stream, a position with no pay level, an assumption nobody has reviewed. The tie-backs a reviewer would run by hand run on every recompute.

Everybody sees a true view, not the same view

A department head sees their own margin and never a salary. HR sees people and never profitability. Finance and the board see the group. One model, one set of numbers, scoped by role — so the budget can finally be circulated.

It reconciles to the book you already signed

Before it replaces anything, it is compared line by line against the workbook it is replacing, and it states what is still unexplained rather than absorbing it. Nobody is asked to trust a rebuild — they are shown the residual.

A re-forecast is a branch, not a copy of the file

Budget, forecast and what-if coexist and are comparable. An approved budget locks, so a re-forecast branches from it rather than being edited under the people who signed it.

What it is for

The point is not a faster spreadsheet. It is a budget that arrives on time, stays true all year, and can be handed to the people who own the numbers.

Get the budget season back
Collection becomes a round with a deadline and a visible queue instead of six weeks of chasing. The consolidation is already done when the last answer lands.
Stop losing money to things nobody said
An unpriced position, an unanswered category, a contract attached to nothing — each is a row on a queue with a figure beside it, rather than a silence that looks exactly like a zero.
Make headcount arithmetic rather than argument
Every request arrives with its fully-loaded cost, the project it is for, the margin and bench it was measured against, and a decision trail — before anybody sits down to discuss it.
Put margin where the decisions are
Every department sees the gross margin it earns and the overhead it carries, on the same basis as every other department, all year — not once in a pack in November.
Give the board one consolidated view
Group revenue, cost, EBITDA and net profit with intercompany eliminated and each company still visible underneath — built from the same figures the departments are working with.
Be able to answer on the day
A deal slips or is lost, and the re-forecast is a branch of the budget rather than a new copy of the file. The answer is available that afternoon, not in the November pack.

What you will see in the demo

An invented professional-services group, budgeted end to end, with a budget that ties.

Budget command centre

The year on one screen: revenue, gross profit, EBITDA and net profit, committed against pipeline, headcount and bench, and how many checks passed on the last recompute.

Contracts and pipeline

The book itself — every contract, what it is worth, whether it is won or weighted, who delivers it and which stream it earns in. This is where the revenue on every other screen comes from.

People and staffing

The roster, and each person’s cost built from policy rather than typed: social insurance, gratuity, leave, tickets, visas. Change a policy and every one of them moves.

Hiring

Positions that do not exist yet, each carrying its own fully-loaded cost and the margin and bench checks it was measured against — including one that failed both and was escalated rather than blocked.

Profit and loss

The full statement, month by month, assembled in one place and read by every other screen — so no two views of the group can disagree about what a subtotal means.

Group

Each company side by side, intercompany identified and eliminated in its own column, and the consolidated view the board actually reads — with every line proving the parts add back to the whole.

Differences from the source workbook

The portal set against the spreadsheet it replaces, line by line, with each gap named as the workbook’s defect, a decision somebody owes, or a report nobody has run — and the remainder stated as unexplained rather than absorbed.

Scenarios

Budget and re-forecast side by side, the forecast branched from the budget rather than copied beside it. One lost deal and one slipped programme, and what they do to the year.

Collection

The round as a process rather than an inbox: every team and every input area as a cell, what is in, what is late, what came back and why.

Revenue streams and apportionment

What the group sells, held separately from who delivers it, with shared teams charged out to the streams they serve and credited back to the directorate that pays them — netting to zero, visibly.

Checks

The invariants, passing or failing, from the last recompute. The screen that says whether the budget can be trusted before anybody presents it.

Ask the data

A question in plain language, answered from the figures — and answered within what your role is allowed to see, never around it.

Blash Budgeting is built and run by Blash.
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