Zero-Based Budgeting: Decision Packages, Ranking & Cost Baselines

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Analyse Harborline Foods' FY2026 cost baseline: each category as a % of revenue, its growth, and total cost against revenue.
• Turn last year's activity costs into unit costs, rebuild FY2027 costs from next year's volumes and size the savings if every activity hit its benchmark unit cost.
• Turn the cumulative cost and benefit of each department's three service levels into incremental packages, calculate their benefit-to-cost ratios and compare the current level with the baseline.
• Rank all twelve increments of four departments by benefit-to-cost and calculate the cumulative cost in rank order without sorting the list.
• Draw the funding line through the ranked packages at the USD 8.6 m cap, flag each package Yes/No, total the funded budget and colour the funded rows.
• Build each department's FY2027 ZBB budget from its funded packages and calculate the savings against the FY2026 baseline, in dollars and in percent.
• Build the incremental budget (baseline + 4%), compare it with the ZBB budget department by department, net off the cost of running ZBB and chart both budgets.
• Track the first six months of the ZBB budget: monthly variances, cumulative budget and actual, the savings captured against the old baseline and a line chart of the cumulative path.