Committed already

The fourth-quarter budget arrives on one slide, as one number, and the number looks like money that could still go anywhere.

Read the lines under it and most of it went somewhere in the spring. The agency retainer, signed in January, runs to December. The tools, the analytics, the email platform, the listening subscription, invoiced annually and already paid. The media booked when the annual deals were done, because the good inventory for the promotional month and for Riyadh's season is sold in advance and the rate depended on committing early. The sponsorship agreed at a dinner nobody minuted.

Add it up and the number on the slide has already been spent. What is left, the part anyone in the room can point at a new idea, is about a tenth. Sometimes less.

And the whole September argument is over that tenth. Every proposal, every agency pitch, every "what if we tried", is a claim on the same small pool, while the room talks as though the big number were on the table.

I have watched teams spend a month building a plan for the full figure, present it, and discover in the meeting that nine tenths of it had been decided by people who left the company in April.

The committed money is not sunk in the accountant's sense; it will buy something. It is sunk in the sense that matters for planning: no decision taken this month can move it, so it has no business being in the room where this month's decisions get made.

So I plan the loose money as if it were the whole budget. The tenth gets the full treatment, the real argument, the honest choice between the things it could do.

Because for every decision still open, it is the whole budget.