Avoid budget slippage in your reward process thanks to Youbo - practical example

A company that unexpectedly spends more on bonuses and salaries than planned eats into its profits. Naturally, every budget manager wants to avoid this. Compensation tool Youbo eliminates budget slippage in HR. Pieter-Jan Boden, People Director of SD Worx, shares his experience.

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September 30, 2025

Thanks to Youbo, there is hardly any difference between our planned and spent reward budget. Previously, this could escalate. That is now a thing of the past. For a company like ours, where salaries account for 65% of the total cost, that makes a huge difference. When the cost is under control, you don't cut into your profits.

Pieter-Jan Boden, People Director

What causes budget slippage in rewards?

Reward processes often occur in Excel. Documents are split by department. After the manager fills in their document, HR merges all the documents again. This increases the risk of budget slippage.

• Managers have no visibility of the total budget. During the allocation process, they do not see in Excel how much budget is left. As a result, they often exceed their budget.
• Spreadsheets are error-prone. Versions easily arise. This leads to uncontrolled expenditures.
• With spreadsheets, HR notices overruns late – sometimes too late to correct the issue.

Pieter-Jan Boden: “At SD Worx, we grant salary increases to 6,500 people in 19 countries. We have 2 months for this: February and March. That's tight, because the entire process must take place during that period: from evaluation to the actual salary increase, including calibration and communication. With Excel, it was impossible to complete all countries simultaneously. An error or an overrun was sometimes only noticed after the salary increases had already been communicated. By then, it's too late to make adjustments.”

How does Youbo solve this?

• Managers allocate their budget in real-time using the tool. They can see when they exceed their budget. They can easily make adjustments.
• The budget can be distributed across multiple levels. Team leads or department heads can also manage their own sub-budgets. The budgets can also be defined in more detail.
• With Youbo, no document versions are created. The data is centrally managed and immediately updated. This means: fewer manual errors.
• Youbo makes deviations more visible and immediately apparent. It is easy to correct.
• Youbo supports multicurrency. The tool converts everything into a single currency in real-time. You maintain an overview without manual calculations.

Pieter-Jan Boden: “Currency conversions used to be a bottleneck in Excel. Converting and verifying the data took additional time in an already tight process. Overruns could sometimes not be corrected in time.”

• It is also possible to set hard budget limits in Youbo. No manager can allocate too much anymore.

Pieter-Jan Boden: “We wanted to allow room to give someone something extra, for example, in case of exceptional performance or a closed deal. That's why we worked without hard limits. If a manager goes over budget, the bar turns red, but they can still submit their figures. We rely on common sense at the team level, and at the highest level, all figures are consolidated, and the overruns are offset against the underruns. This proved sufficient to solve budget slippage.”

Who is Youbo most interesting for?

Pieter-Jan Boden: “For anyone with complex reward processes, especially multinationals or rapidly growing medium-sized companies. In small companies, you can still keep an overview. But once you scale, you lose that. Unplanned costs affect your profit margin. Youbo helps you keep costs better under control.”

Youbo pays off in two ways.

1. Efficiency gain: HR and managers save time.
2. Cost control: real-time insight and transparency reduce budget slippage.

Pieter-Jan Boden: “In the first year with Youbo, we were already much closer to the planned budget. After two cycles, I can say: the slippage is gone. I was amazed at how accurately we are now on budget. Change management certainly plays a role. Our managers are happy that they finally have a tool to monitor their budgets. They realize how crucial it is. Youbo helps them with that.”