The Problem:
Many organisations use Microsoft Excel as the solution for creating and managing a budget. This can work fine if you have a small team and just a handful of budget owners.
It can very soon become unmanageable as the number of excel files, the complexity and formulas built in makes management, distribution, and consolidation very time consuming and error prone when the number of budget owners grows.
The pace of marketplace and economic change leads to out-of-date budgets with organisations unable to quickly and accurately re forecast profit or cash positions. The growing number of businesses getting into financial difficulty and sadly in some cases closing is evidence of the lack of real time accurate data to support timely business decisions. One wonders if real time relevant information had been available, would some businesses still be operational?
The Solution:
Having all your data sources in one central Data Warehouse with both a traditional and visual view and the ability to drill-down is a critical step to a robust budgeting and forecasting model. As is browser-based distribution which allows a single budget template to be shared by many. When a budget owner enters a value into a field on the template and saves, consolidation is complete.
Often an organisation has a budget line for example: Marketing and Advertising, that accumulates several distinct spend items. The actual budget owner for Sales & Marketing thinks in multiple values, like brochures, social, TV etc. Having line items or bottom-up entry allows better accuracy on the actual summarised budget amount.
A controlled process that manages various budget templates like Payroll, Capital, Operational and Opex controls for distribution, approval, and consolidation is necessary for efficient budget completion. Solvers Workflow allows the user to build a process to manage every step, adopting all relevant security and permission levels.
Solver Cloud: Corporate Performance Management allows you to solve the manual steps of a budgeting process. Smooth out the issues around distribution, security and finally consolidation of the data. Being browser based it means access from anywhere with security and 2-factor authentication if required.
With the Solver Cloud Reporting & Forecasting adding Microsoft Power-BI with powerful visual KPI’s you will have better control of your business because it is real time.
#Solver #budgeting # forecasting #Olympic # Data