Can you provide real-world examples of businesses successfully using waterfall charts for their budget planning?

Some alternative methods to variance analysis in budget planning include zero-based budgeting, where every expense must be justified for each new period, and flexible budgeting, which adjusts to changes in volume and activity. Another method is incremental budgeting, which uses the previous period's budget as a base and adjusts for future predictions. There's also activity-based budgeting, which allocates costs to individual activities based on their use of resources.

Global companies like Apple or Google can utilize waterfall charts in their budget planning to highlight deviations by using them to understand the total impact of the difference between the budget and the actual spending, also known as variance analysis. This method presents results in an orderly way and emphasizes deviations. The focus on variance is what sets waterfall charts apart from typical bar charts. The columns in the chart can be color-coded so users can easily distinguish priority or risk levels for each category.