The annual budget is where the real strategic thinking happens, and it is also the thing finance teams dread most. It takes too long, it involves too many people, it is out of date before it is finished. The pain is not inevitable. It comes from three fixable things: bad process, bad tech, and a misunderstanding of what the budget is supposed to accomplish.

In this replay, Christian Wattig (Founder, Inside FP&A) walked the five phases of a budget cycle (Pre Kick-Off, Joint Planning, Consolidation, Iteration, Final Alignment) and the specific mistake finance teams make at each one, drawing on 12 annual processes run at P&G, Unilever and Squarespace. The advice is tactical and works regardless of what software you run. David Rapoport (Head of CFO Partnerships, Aleph) closed with short demos of agentic AI inside the process, with audience questions answered along the way.

Built for FP&A leads, controllers and CFOs heading into their annual budget cycle, plus anyone who spent last Q4 chasing department heads for numbers.

Watch the session to learn:

• Why the annual budget should stay a project instead of dissolving into a continuous process
• The five phases of a budget cycle and the mistake that derails each one
• How to plan the plan before kick-off so iterations do not multiply later
• What to do when the numbers come back and nobody recognizes their own inputs
• How to run consolidation without a two-week manual stitching exercise
• Where AI shifts from generating outputs to orchestrating a multi-week, multi-person workflow
• What it looks like when the system tracks assumptions, dependencies, deadlines and who still owes what

Plus, much more...