Dan’s thoughts on estimated demands

Estimated demands got you feeling flat?

This year has been hard for a lot of teams. As senior management try to find the balance between funding services and supporting customers with the cost of living, many teams have had to react to endless modelling of cost and last-minute changes.

Whilst you can't always avoid these scenarios entirely, here's three things you can do to make things easier in the future:

1. Build relationships in the quieter times. You'll need their support when it gets tough.

2. Consider signing off any assumptions you're making around inflation or decisions early on. Not only will you have a document that senior management has signed off with the rationale for your decision, you can also use it when dealing with customer queries, or even include some of the information in your demand pack.

3. Flatten the peaks in your workload. By taking the step to actualise costs on an ongoing basis throughout the year, not only do you improve the information that's available to you when setting budgets, but you've flattened the summer peak. This means you can stagger the release of actual accounts, and the queries (that last well into November now) will have been addressed earlier, giving you more time to budget.

Demands don't need to be demanding. There are lots of steps you can take to create more time and space to reduce the pain that service charge teams are facing.

Interested to find out more? Come say hi at hello@ad-esse.com.