Where the Ramadan money came from

The Ramadan number in most regional budgets is not new money.

I have built the agency version of this plan and I have owned the in-house version, and the extra weight on the month arrives the same way in both. Somebody looks at an annual figure divided by twelve, sees that one month is going to do the work of three, and moves the money forward. March and April come into February and March. The line says Ramadan. The source is the rest of the first half.

Nobody hides this. It is written into the re-phased plan, the one with a date in the filename, and the room agrees with it, because the room is usually right. Concentration is the correct answer to a concentrated month.

What does not get written down is the second sentence.

The approval says yes to the number. It does not say, on paper, that the following quarter is now smaller on purpose, that April and May will therefore read weak against last year, and that this is the plan working rather than the plan failing.

So the cost arrives later, in a different room, with different people in it. Some time in May somebody senior reads a flat quarter and asks what has happened to demand. The honest answer, that the quarter was emptied deliberately in a February meeting, is now being offered by the person who is standing in front of a miss. A reason produced at the same moment as a bad number is not heard as a reason.

The Ramadan budget is not decided in February. It is decided in May, when somebody asks where it came from, and the only version that survives the question is the one that wrote the answer down before anybody needed it.