Every finance team has sat through the same December ritual: locking a spreadsheet, chasing five department heads for their numbers, and hoping nobody introduces a formula error in the final version. By February, half the assumptions are already out of date, and by the first re-forecast, the original budget has quietly become a historical document rather than a working plan.
If that sounds uncomfortably familiar, you are not alone. New data on corporate budgeting practices across Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia suggests that, for a large share of finance teams in the region, budgeting struggles are not the exception.
Read more:Can Your Business Escape The Endless Spreadsheet-And-Email Approval Chain During Budgeting?
Why this matters right now
A budget is meant to be the mechanism a finance team uses to allocate resources, test assumptions, and hold the business accountable to a plan throughout the year, not a document produced once and quietly forgotten until the next planning season begins.
Sadly, it is often treated as an annual obligation. It is untenable now, as regulators across Southeast Asia move faster than annual planning cycles were ever designed to keep up with, and as competition for scarce finance talent makes “we’ll fix the process when we have more people” a strategy with a shrinking shelf life.
Globally, 29% of organisations need more than 10 days to finalise a single forecast iteration, according to GrowCFO’s 2025 Tech Innovation Report. Though that statistic is a global benchmark, it is a useful yardstick: finance teams across Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia, still leaning heavily on spreadsheets for planning, are likely to meet or exceed that mark rather than beat it.
Here is more data on where budgeting stands today in these three markets, and why the same three pressures show up again and again, however different the economies look on the surface.
Five things the data tells us about budgeting in the region
1. Forecast cycles are still measured in weeks, not days
A forecast iteration that takes 10 or more days is a structural lag between what is happening in the business and what finance can actually see and act on. For fast-moving markets like Vietnam, where growth and regulatory change are both accelerating, a two-week-old forecast can already be describing a business that no longer exists. The knock-on effect rarely stops at planning.
Late forecasts mean late decisions on hiring, inventory, pricing and investment, all made on numbers that were already ageing the moment they landed on a CFO’s desk.
Read more:10 Common Mistakes in Financial Forecasting & How to Avoid Them
2. Digital ambition is outpacing digital budgeting
In Thailand, 44% of businesses have already reached the “Doing Digital” stage of maturity, according to Deloitte’s 2025 Thailand Digital Transformation Survey, yet budgeting and planning processes have generally not kept pace. In Vietnam, 65% of SMEs remain unaware of the benefits cloud-based budgeting tools could offer them, per Ken Research’s 2025 study on Vietnam’s cloud FMS market.
The gap highlights finance teams in organisations that consider themselves digitally mature, yet still use a planning process that wouldn’t have looked out of place a decade ago.
3. Regulatory change is quietly rewriting the budgeting brief
Vietnam’s new tax administration law, Thailand’s Pillar Two obligations, and Cambodia’s Capital Gains Tax each add a layer of complexity that static, annual budgets were never built to absorb. It is telling that 89% of Vietnamese IT decision-makers now rank compliance as the single most important factor in choosing financial software, according to Vietnam Briefing’s 2026 coverage of the market, ahead of cost or ease of use.
Compliance has stopped being a back-office concern and become a front-line budgeting requirement. A budget that cannot be adjusted quickly when a new circular or reporting obligation lands is no longer just outdated. It is a compliance exposure in its own right.
Read more:Bridging Accounting Standards: How Dusit Le Palais Tu Hoa Hanoi Achieved Compliance and Efficiency
4. Cambodia’s dual-currency economy adds a layer most templates miss
Cambodia presents a distinct challenge as foreign currency deposits make up 84.4% of broad money (M2) in its economy, according to the National Bank of Cambodia’s 2025 Financial Stability Review. A budgeting process built around a single-currency assumption simply isn’t built for that reality, and generic templates imported from single-currency markets tend to understate the effect of exchange rate movement on the year’s numbers.
For finance teams operating across borders in the region, this is one of the clearest examples of why a regional benchmark matters more than a global one. What counts as best practice in a single-currency market can be actively misleading in a dual-currency one.
5. The finance talent pipeline cannot keep pace with the workload
Cambodia has fewer than 200 IFRS-qualified accountants supporting more than half a million SMEs. Vietnam and Thailand face their own versions of the same problem, in which expertise and capacity have not scaled with the volume and complexity of the work finance teams are now asked to do.
When a manual, spreadsheet-heavy process is also understaffed, forecast delays and errors are unavoidable, and the people carrying that load are the ones most likely to burn out or move on, which only tightens the talent squeeze further.
TRG’s perspective
Together, the five findings above describe a region where finance teams are being asked to do more, faster, and with fewer margins for error, using processes and tools that were largely designed for a slower, simpler set of demands.
At TRG, we see this pattern across every market we work in. As an Infor Gold Channel Partner with three decades of experience implementing Infor SunSystems and Infor EPM for finance teams across Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and the wider region, we know that the fix rarely starts with ripping out an entire system. It starts with understanding exactly where your own process sits against the pattern above, and making a deliberate choice about what to change first, whether that is closing the compliance gap, moving off spreadsheets for the highest-risk parts of the cycle, or building the case for driver-based planning.
That is why we built a resource hub around this research rather than a single download. Some finance leaders want the full regional picture before anything else. Some want to see what a modern, driver-based budgeting process actually looks like in practice. Others would rather start with a straight answer about their own process, no whitepaper required. All three are valid starting points, which is exactly why we built all three.
The findings above are a summary. The full regional benchmark and what modern budgeting looks like in practice are now available together as a complete budgeting toolkit on our resource page.
If you would rather start with a broader view of how corporate budgeting approaches differ across markets, our article on the 5 most common budgeting approaches is a good next stop.
Related reading
- Can Your Business Escape The Endless Spreadsheet-And-Email Approval Chain During Budgeting?
- The Shadow Excel Ledger Is Costing Your School More Than You Think
- What Is Infor EPM? A Complete Guide to Financial Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting
- Experts Explained: Breaking Down Data Walls with Infor EPM
