Timing a budget chart set against Georgia’s calendar

Finance offices write to us in the same week the printer’s slot is already booked. The autumn draft of a municipal or state budget is not a flexible artefact. If the table of contents is locked and the functional classification has been sent to the typesetter, our plates have to exist as files, not as a conversation.

We count backwards from the printer date, not forwards from the day someone remembered charts. Four weeks is enough for a set that follows last year’s plates. Seven weeks is more honest when the classification changed or when capital projects must be grouped above a new lari threshold. Less than three weeks, with no prior volume, is how dual-axis charts get into books: there is no time left to refuse them.

The mid-year review is a second document. It uses executed figures, not the autumn plan, and it should not reuse a plate that still says “planned” in the caption. We treat it as a separate commission because the extract is different. Offices that ask us to “just update the colours” on the old plate are asking us to mislabel outturns.

If your calendar and our diary cannot meet, the honest letter is a refusal. A surcharge does not create days in October. Better a finance committee with last year’s plates and a spoken correction than a new picture whose caption is still in draft when the sitting begins.