Shortening the Budgeting/Planning Cycle

How do I complete my budget in less time, freeing up resources for other Finance responsibilities, and activities that add more value?

Most companies in the $10 million - $500 million annual revenue range spend several months on their annual budgeting cycle, according to a survey by Centage and IOMA.  Much of that time is used collecting, cleansing and consolidating data, followed by revisions, more revisions, and even more revisions. Committing the necessary resources for this enormous task is mandatory, of course, yet it’s not like your other responsibilities go on hold during budgeting season. Meanwhile, who has time for the activities that really add value to the organization?

What if you could build your budget on a faster timetable, so you could devote more resources to other department needs, and have that budget be more accurate to boot?  Many of our customers report shaving days, even weeks, off their annual budgeting cycle.

Budget Maestro / Planning Maestro shorten your budgeting process in these specific ways:

• New users can easily import the components of their budget model into the software to get started. The chart of accounts, organizational hierarchy, payroll information, fixed asset data, and trial balance import templates in Budget Maestro / Planning Maestro are pre-formatted so data is imported in seconds.
• Built-in financial intelligence and business rules mean there are no formulas to create, the spreads are built in (and easily modified), and you can say goodbye to complex linkages between spreadsheets.
• Building your budget in minutes is not a pipedream. Whether you use zero-based budgeting, activity-based budgeting or start from last year’s actuals, you can carry over the previous year budget – forecast, actual or a combination -- to create your new fiscal year budget.
• Revisions and reiterations flow through your numbers as Budget Maestro / Planning Maestro automatically recalculates and updates the budget and all related assumptions and relationships within minutes.  No need to track down broken links.
• Data is consolidated automatically, not manually as in spreadsheets, saving hours of tedious work.
• Reporting is easy – just a few clicks to an up-to-date Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement at any time, along with a library of other pre-built reports.
• If your department managers populate their own budgets, they can’t break the model by changing fields or links, saving Finance loads of fix-it work. Even better, the user-friendly interface helps managers input accurate and relevant budget data.