It shouldn’t be news to anybody when I say that the relationship between accountants and IT people is not always a happy one. Our priorities often conflict, each of us speaks a jargon that is impenetrable to the other and there’s a lingering suspicion on both sides that we’re being set up to take the blame for the other side’s mistakes.

Delivering services effectively and efficiently is the main challenge facing any government, of any country. The task is even more challenging when, as in South Africa, the government needs to make up a decades-long service delivery backlog with limited resources.

The budget is the single most important management tool most businesses have. There are 2 performance measures readily available to most businesses, comparison of actual figures to last year’s, or to the budget. Unfortunately last year’s figures are historical and don’t include any strategic changes to the business, good or bad. By contrast budgets let you build on history, taking into account strategic changes in delivery, and including best

Local software developer idu Software has entered into an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) agreement with US-based QlikTech to embed QlikView functionality within budgeting, forecasting and reporting application idu-Concept.

Having good checks and balances in place is a large part of sound financial management. Authorisations, approvals, spending limits and the like sometimes seem tedious to those who are just trying to get the work done, but they’re absolutely indispensable in a well-run organisation.

If asked straight out, most people probably know the right answer -- “everyone” -- but knowing the answer is not the same thing as living it. Most of the time, in most businesses, most people are happy to leave it all to the finance department.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations try to be all things to all people and come in the form of a tool box that needs to be customised by a consultant to suite the business, says Kevin Phillips, CEO of idu Software.

With government financial maladministration and inappropriate spending in the news again, it’s tempting to think that this could never happen in the private sector - but there are definite parallels. The woes currently facing municipalities in particular are an absolutely classic example of what happens when the basics of financial transparency are not in place.

Nobody spends money on new business software expecting it to fail -- but failures do happen. Systems don’t work, or they do work but not in the way that was expected, or users flat-out refuse to change the way they do things, or everything ends up taking much longer and costing much, much more than it was supposed to.

‘Bottom-up budgeting’ (the modern-day inverse of centrist, ‘top-down’ budgeting), is a collective process that engages cost centre managers in setting the business’s expectations for its expenditure in the year ahead.