Every budget tells a story - for those who care to listen

9 February 2026·Billy Cheung

Source: Pexels

I was working on an annual IT budget at one point. Drafts were prepared, shared with Finance, and put through the usual cycle of feedback and revision. And as anyone who has handled a budget would recognise, the same questions always appear:

"Why is this number so high?"
"And why is that one so low?"

On the surface, the figures are nothing more than numbers - some organisations treat them as flexible guidance, others as an unbreakable rulebook that everything must fit within.
But over time, one realisation kept returning to me: budgets often say far more than they seem to. They are signals of how work has unfolded, echoes of decisions made long before, and occasionally subtle reflections of culture within an organisation.

Two lines from that budget stood out. One landed far higher than expected. Another came in noticeably low. Both looked simple enough on the spreadsheet, yet each carried a very different story.

Case 1: When high numbers come from "everything must stay unchanged"

One line in the budget looked unusually high. It included overlapping tools and duplicated services - the sort of redundancy that would normally be trimmed without hesitation.
Finance reacted exactly as expected: why keep paying for two things that do the same job?

But the numbers told a different story.

The inflated cost traced back to an earlier decision: a refusal to adopt changes that came with a system migration.
The message at the time was clear - "everything must stay unchanged." Processes, interfaces, routines, the way people worked day to day.
Nothing could shift, even if the new system offered opportunities to streamline and simplify.

And so the organisation paid for both worlds. The new system, essential for long-term scalability. And the old system, kept alive solely to preserve the comfort of existing habits.
On the surface, the outcomes were identical; in practice, the budget absorbed the impact.

The higher spend wasn't waste. It was a signal.
It reflected teams already stretched thin, with no capacity to adapt or redesign the way things worked.
When people are overloaded, change feels like an extra burden - even when the change would reduce the burden in the long run.
The result: spending increased, processes stayed rigid, and the bureaucracy holding everything together remained untouched.
What made the situation sharper was the lost potential. The same level of investment could have funded additional headcount to ease workload, supported a cleaner transition to the new system, and helped the organisation operate more sustainably.
Instead, the choice to keep things identical created a long tail of duplicated cost.

In the end, it all circled back to the same belief:
everything must stay the same.

And the budget quietly recorded the consequences.

Case 2: When low numbers reveal "things don't go as planned"

Another line in the budget told the opposite story. It was expected to rise, yet the forecast showed it dipping below the current level.
On paper, that might look like good news - a neat saving, tidy enough to draw a small smile during a review.

But the lower figure wasn't a sign of efficiency. It was a sign of delay.

The volume of services that were meant to be used - and budgeted for - simply wouldn't be that high in the coming period.
Not because the work had become cheaper, but because the projects that those services depended on had slipped. Milestones moved. Preparations stalled. What should have been spent after progress simply wasn't spent at all.

The underspend, in this case, didn't represent smart financial control. It represented value that failed to materialise on time.

And that delay carried its own ripple effects: frustrated stakeholders, goals pushed further out, and mounting pressure on teams already stretched thin.
In some cases, the strain showed in departures and turnover, followed by the inevitable cycle of recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity.

The number looked "great", almost reassuring. But beneath that line sat a story of deferred delivery and the cost of momentum that never arrived.

In its own way, the budget recorded that too.

What the variances actually say

Viewed together, these two budget lines - one pushed up by the insistence on keeping everything unchanged, the other pulled down by work that never moved - point to something deeper than cost control.
Both reveal the same underlying truth: the health of a budget is tied closely to the health of resource management.

Not the "HR-human resources" in the narrow sense, and not Finance in isolation.
It is resource management in its broader, strategic form - the ability to align people, time, systems, and decisions with where the organisation is trying to go.

High numbers can signal an organisation too overloaded to change. Low numbers can signal one too delayed to deliver.
In both cases, the variance is less about the money and more about the motion behind it: whether the right capacity was available, whether momentum held, whether decisions were made with a short-term lens or a long-term one.

Budgets act a bit like health charts. The numbers matter, but the patterns matter more. And those patterns often reflect whether resources were planned, protected, and deployed in a way that supported progress - or quietly held it back.

In the end, the stories behind overspend and underspend aren't financial stories at all. They're stories about direction, timing, and how well an organisation sets itself up to realise its vision.

Every budget tells a story. Some speak through high figures, some through low ones. The story isn't about perfection; it's about the choices that shaped the path forward.

For those who care to listen, the numbers say plenty.