The budget that grew on paper

The regional budget is set in dollars in a head office and spent in pounds in Cairo.

Nobody experiences that as a decision. It is a template. The plan carries one currency so the lines add up on one page, and Egypt is converted at whatever rate finance was using in the autumn.

Then the currency moves. It has moved more than once in the years I have worked on this market, and the same thing happens to the same slide every time.

The number of dollars does not change. It was approved, phased and entered in the system, and in January it comes back to the market team as a larger commitment than last year. Convert it at the rate the buyer will invoice at and it is fewer weeks on air, fewer stores covered and fewer packs in people's hands than the smaller-looking figure bought two years ago. The team gets congratulated for money it cannot spend.

The arithmetic is the easy half. What makes it hard is that the arithmetic is not what the meeting is about. Saying the increase is not an increase sounds like a market asking for more, which is what a market always sounds like from a head office.

Arguing about the rate does not work. Stating the plan in what the plan buys does: so many weeks of pressure on the biggest channel, so many stores served, so many packs sampled, a cost per thousand the buyer can quote back next month. Currency becomes a note on the page.

A budget is a quantity, not a number. Plan a market in what that market buys and you have treated it as a place where things cost money. Plan it in the head office currency and it is a line that has to add up somewhere else.