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Budgeting

In business today, strategic plans and budgets are aligned and used to set priorities, track progress towards strategic goals, and support management decisions. When compared with actual results, the budget represents the primary indicator of company performance. However, many enterprises are struggling with incomplete, inconsistent and inaccurate budgets that invalidate the planning process. With increased global competition and consumer awareness, there’s even more pressure placed on an already critical business function.

Does it take you too long to prepare a budget?
Do your budgets need to be restated because they’re inconsistent or inaccurate?
Why do so many companies end up with a discrepancy between corporate goals and the submitted departmental figures?
How often do budget holders believe that they’re not responsible or accountable for their numbers?

Our Budgeting Analytical application streamlines the budget process for better process control, reporting, and analysis. It improves planning, delivers administrative control, reduces the number of budget iterations and ensures optimum use of information.

The Budgeting Process

No two organizations budget exactly the same way. There are various established budgeting methods like cost center accounting, activity-based budgeting, top-down strategic planning, and bottom-up departmental budgeting. Whatever method used, the challenges in terms of collecting, agreeing with and interpreting the information remain the same.

Many budgeting systems are distributed in nature, across locations and currencies. They’re usually hierarchical processes starting off at an administrative or corporate level, and then passed down to budget controllers.

After performing checks on a budget version, the budget center manager will return their budget to the budget controller to validate the submissions under their control. Controllers must then either accept or reject this version of the budget. A rejected budget will be returned to the budget center manager for further refinement. Once the budget controller has accepted all their returned budgets, the process can advance to the next level. The entire process is often repeated until the budget administrator has accepted the proposed budget for the whole organization.

Budgeting is a lengthy and complex process involving a large number of disparate users with lots of data that needs to be processed and made available for reporting and analysis. The typical spreadsheet-based solution suffers from a lack of process control, poor data accuracy and integration, poor scalability, high maintenance and limited reporting and analysis capabilities.

Our proven solution solves the most common issues associated with the preparation of plans, budgets, and forecasts. Each stage of the budgeting process is replicated — securely and efficiently — to reduce the amount of time it takes to produce and maintain an accurate budget. The application also provides sophisticated analysis, advanced navigation, and data visualization to deliver the right information to the right people in the right format

Key Benefits

Reduce the time spent on producing the budget; spend more time analyzing the information
Total control of the budget construction process, and improve the consistency and quality of the final budget
Use exception reporting, assumption checking, and trend analysis to highlight problems and opportunities
Faster implementations without the customization restrictions of traditional spreadsheets and packaged applications