Planning Year End Budgets: Furniture That Counts

Around now, a certain kind of email starts to arrive. It goes something like this: "We have some budget left before the year end. Can we get desks in before Christmas?" If your business has a December year end, office furniture year end planning tends to happen in November, usually in a hurry, and usually because somebody has just noticed a number in a spreadsheet.

That is fine. Spending money you planned to spend, on things your team needs, is a perfectly good use of the last weeks of the year. What I would like to take out of it is the hurry.

One thing first. This is general guidance about buying furniture, not tax advice. Whether a purchase counts in this year or next, and how it is treated in your accounts, is a question for your accountant. Ask them which date matters for your books: the order, the invoice or the delivery. It is one email, and it saves an awkward January.

Why office furniture lands at the year end

Part of it is budget. A line set aside in January and never touched looks different in November, and nobody wants to explain to the directors why the chairs they asked for in spring never turned up.

The other part is timing. A refresh gets put off until a quieter moment, and for plenty of businesses that moment is the last fortnight of December, when half the team is on leave. Hardly anyone is sitting at the desks, so it is a good time to swap them.

Work back from the date you need it

The usual mistake is to choose the furniture first and think about the date second. Do it the other way round. Start with the day you want everything in place and work backwards.

Every product page on our site shows an arrives-by date, counted in working days with weekends and bank holidays already taken out. Over Christmas that matters more than usual. Christmas Day is a Friday this year and Boxing Day a Saturday, so the bank holidays in England and Wales are Friday 25 December, Monday 28 December and Friday 1 January. A date that sounds like a week away in mid December can be a good deal further than that.

Free standard delivery usually arrives inside a week. Made-to-order pieces, such as seating in a fabric you have chosen, usually take 10 to 15 working days, and the product page says so before you commit. Installation is usually booked within about 10 working days, on a day agreed with you first.

A few things that help:

• Look at the dates on everything in your basket and order the slowest item first, so it is not holding up the rest.

• If the room has to be working on a particular day, book installation rather than hoping the flat-pack builds itself over the holidays.

• Put the access details in the delivery instructions box at checkout: which floor, whether there is a lift, where a lorry can park and who to ask for. It goes out with the order.

• Make sure somebody will be in. The week before Christmas is exactly when the person who was going to sign for the pallet is on leave.

Spend it where it counts

"Furniture that counts" means two things to me. It has to count for the books, which is your accountant's department. And it has to count for the people using it, which is ours.

If the budget will not stretch to everything, spend it where people sit longest. A chair used eight hours a day earns its keep much faster than a meeting table used for two hours a week. Start with the office chairs people complain about, then the desks, then the storage.

Look at the guarantee as hard as the price. A desk you will still be using in ten years is a better use of year end money than one you will be replacing in three. Our office furniture with a 10 year guarantee page puts the longest-guaranteed ranges in one place. The Oslo back-to-back bench desks in the photograph are one of them, with desks from 120cm to 160cm wide in runs for two, four or six people.

Make it easy to sign off, too. Every price on our site is the same for every business, shown ex VAT unless you switch it, and the price on the page is the price you pay. If the basket needs approval before anyone orders, save it as a quote and send it round. Nobody has to ring us for a better number, because there is not one.

If you leave it late

It happens. If it is mid December and the budget has only just been confirmed, read the dates before you fall in love with anything. Choose from what can reach you in time rather than picking the perfect desk and hoping. All of our office desks show their date on the page, so you can compare before you commit.

If something cannot land before the break, order it properly for January rather than squeezing it into the last working day before Christmas, when the building is half empty and the one person with the loading bay key has gone home.