End of Fiscal Year

admin June 30, 2008 management stuff 4 Comments

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Today is the last day of our fiscal year. We underspent our budget by $155,000. This is very sad and my only excuse is that I’ve been here for just 4 months. Soon, I will have no excuse. Overspending and underspending your budget by more than a percent or so is, imho, a sign of bad management. I’ve seen many more leaders underspend than overspend, so I think people don’t understand how much you look like a failure when you don’t spend your budget. Basically, severe underspending says, “remember all that work you did to get me the money I wanted? What a waste of time!” Not good for credibility. Unless, of course, you saved the money through some brilliant negotiation or strategic shift, in which case you should be touting your genius as much as possible. But at this point, at this hour of the day, it’s obvious our underspending is more of an “oops, I forgot to replace 4 database servers, our Google search appliance, buy survey software, and upgrade our Oracle licenses!”

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4 Responses to “End of Fiscal Year”

  1. Kyle said:

    Jun 30, 08 at 6:09 pm

    You may send a check to me. We overspent by about that much. I will use the same excuse you did. I’ve only been here six months, and my predecessor knew nothing about budgeting. We tried building a budget from scratch for next year so that budgeting matches historical spending patterns, so I should be closer next year, unless there is some undocumented expense nobody knows about, or they cut my budget 3 times next year (which is what they did this year). I’m thinking about spending 90% of my budget by winter break so there is nothing left to cut. Not the greatest strategy, but it seems to be what everyone else here does.

  2. kdghty said:

    Jul 01, 08 at 7:37 am

    We used 99.69% of our budget. I’m so proud. Still, there’s $1636.65 sitting out there – we could have bough another laptop!

    Ah well – close enough is good enough.

  3. Sukey said:

    Jul 01, 08 at 12:35 pm

    There should be some higher ed CTO peer to peer mico-lending site folks can use to balance out their budgets.

  4. admin said:

    Jul 01, 08 at 5:01 pm

    KD gets the prize. Maybe we could use ebay for Sukey’s idea? I buy it here but ship it to Kyle?

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