Niamh Carolan joined a Dublin-based SaaS company when headcount was 28. By the time we spoke, it was 140. Budget monitoring had not kept pace with the growth. She describes what that looked like and how the team restructured oversight without slowing down the business.
What uncontrolled growth does to a budget
How did the problem present itself?
Tool subscriptions were the clearest symptom. We had three different teams paying for overlapping software. Nobody had a complete picture because each department had its own card and its own approval process. Or in some cases, no formal approval process at all.
The structural fix
How did you create accountability without creating bureaucracy?
We assigned a budget owner to each department. Not the department head automatically, but whoever was closest to the actual spending decisions. That person receives a monthly budget pack: actuals, remaining allocation, and a short variance explanation template. They fill it in, not finance.
This matters because finance should be asking questions, not writing the narrative on behalf of the people who made the decisions. When the department owns the explanation, the quality of information improves considerably.
The monitoring cadence
How often do you review?
Monthly for most departments. Weekly for engineering and sales, where spend can shift quickly. We use a shared dashboard in BI tooling so budget owners can check their position any day they choose. The monthly review then becomes a conversation about trends, not a first look at the numbers.
Giving people visibility into their own data before the formal meeting changes the quality of those conversations entirely.