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 It takes too long, it involves too many people, it is out of date before it is finished.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.

Christian Wattig (Founder, Inside FP&A) has led 12 annual budgeting processes at P&G, Unilever and Squarespace. He owns the bulk of the session, walking 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. The advice is tactical and works regardless of what software you run. David Rapoport (Head of CFO Partnerships, Aleph) closes with short demos of agentic AI inside the process, and takes questions live.

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.

Join in on the discussion 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...