Corporations spend too much time budgeting and not enough time planning. As you kick off the budget season, you should be thinking about how to derive more business value from the process.

Budgets don’t work, according to a majority of participants in a Business Finance budgeting and planning survey. Sixty-five percent of survey respondents said they expected their current budgets to become invalid by the middle of the year and 20 percent of respondents said they expected their 2009 budgets to become useless before the year even began.

The finance department’s workload is always growing, and managers are looking for ways to carve out time and space to take on this new work without increasing costs. The tough part is determining what to cut.

Sitting at the top of the list of "dumb stuff" finance teams want to eliminate is the monthly close. Business Finance readers told blogger and budgeting expert Steve Player that these financial statements are time-consuming to produce and add very little value. Player has suggestions for throwing out the monthly close while keeping your banker, who is used to a monthly financial report, comfortable lending to you.

If you're looking for insights on the Beyond Budgeting principles and their application (as well as for general insights on improving organizational planning and control capabilities), check out this list of books.

How integrated are your company's sales forecasting and demand planning (SFDP) activities? Combining these forward-looking functions can increase innovation and effectiveness. Read Ventana Research's Analyst Note "Integrate Sales Forecasting and Demand Planning" in the BPM Resource Center to learn more.

The 6th Annual BPM Summit brought together some of the business world's foremost practitioners to explore the transformational role of finance in the enterprise. If you missed the live event, you can still enjoy access to the audio and slide shows from the keynote presentations at our on-demand archive.