SMART MONEY: Balancing Act
Author: Hunter Holcombe
September 2008
Columns
In many ways, planning and handling meetings is similar to the experience of dining out. It’s exciting choosing the restaurant, dressing up and picking out the appetizers, entrée and wine. When you’re hungry and having fun, money doesn’t seem all that important. Afterward, however, when you’re full and lethargic, the bill is dropped and reality abruptly returns. “Wow, did we really order all this food?”
Hopefully, there is not as much of a sticker shock when you reconcile your meeting budgets, but often—especially in these days of fluctuating rates and taxes—it can be tricky to account for the smaller expenses that quickly add up.“The areas that can really foul you up are taxes and gratuities,” says Bonnie Wallsh, CMP, CMM, chief strategist of Bonnie Wallsh Associates, LLC, a professional meeting management and training firm based in Charlotte, N.C. “You can’t control that [like most ne-gotiable expenses].”
Waiting until your event is over, and you are back at your desk with a pile of bills and receipts, is a tempting way to deal with your budget when you are on-site and handling all the nuts and bolts—things that can’t wait until later. But this can prove to be a trap if you are dealing with a lot of variables or using vendors you don’t have experience with. Instead, getting into a habit of continuous budget reconciliation will help assure that you catch billing errors as well as make any needed adjustments mid-stream.
“I meet with the convention services manager on a daily basis to review the previous day’s billing,” Wallsh says. “I find it is very helpful—it is fresh on your mind, and it’s easy to correct errors before they go into the computer. You can correct it before the bill comes to you.”
Many times, simple miscommunication between you and your vendors can result in hidden charges you shouldn’t have to pay for. When you are dealing with several days’ worth of billing, it can be hard not to gloss over these items. Also, when you don’t have your hotel, catering or convention representative right there with you, you are less inclined to ask an innocuous question about every line item. Simply taking 10 minutes to sit down with them each day, as Wallsh advises, makes it easy to scan through the list and make sure you are both on the same page.
Detailed reports from previous meetings can also make a significant impact on the time it takes you to balance your budget. “Your best friend is history,” Wallsh says. “Figuring out what you spent in the past will determine what you might spend in the future.”
Budget reports are particularly helpful if you are dealing with the same venue or hotel, or the meeting is similar in terms of size or spend. If you’re sure the previous budget was accurate, you can simply compare each current department spend with the previous one to eyeball that everything is on track. But this doesn’t change the fact that every single meeting is unique, and requires a fresh set of contingencies and educated guesswork. New planners should not expect to be neatly hitting their targets. “A budget is an edu-cated guess,” Wallsh says. “You are predicting what you will spend in an area. If you get it exactly right every time, you should go right to Las Vegas [to play the tables]. Most of the time you won’t [get it right].”
While technology might not help increase estimation skills, it can certainly make the reconciliation process easier and more organ-ized. Software hasn’t necessarily made leaps and bounds in this area, as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets have been around for dec-ades and are still one of the best and easiest ways to track expenses. But advances in online communication mean you have a lot more power to track and control your vendors’ bills as they are generated. If you are dealing with multiple vendors—rather than with a single hotel for meeting space, F&B, etc.—request that they e-mail you a daily compilation of running expenses. Then, from the com-fort of your laptop, you can collate the various information into your master document, and e-mail them back with any questions or concerns.
Finally, keep in mind that this is one of the most challenging times to hit your budget bulls-eye. Inflation requires predicting future prices with the keen sense of an economist, while changing hotel taxes and fuel surcharges are bullets you can only dodge once you see them. Creating your own system for ongoing budget reconciliation can go a long way toward keeping you in control at all times.
