How to Improve Budgeting, Planning and Forecasting
This article will provide insight into some of the key features you could expect from modern corporate performance management (CPM) solutions.
Are you dreading your company’s budgeting process? Are you manually exporting data from your ERP system to Excel and compiling numerous spreadsheets or are you manually formatting reports and presentations? Well, if that is you, there is hope for you! It does not have to be that way. There are solutions to improve your budgeting and reporting processes. This blog post will provide insight into some of the key features you could expect from modern corporate performance management (CPM) solutions.
A CPM solution is a specialized solution with the ultimate goal of helping a company make faster and better business decisions. This will guide your company on the path to receiving complete insight to your finances. Instead of carrying the burden of maintaining multiple report writers across several systems and a lack of enterprise-wide dashboards to visualize KPIs, a CPM solution like BI360 offers advanced reporting, planning and dashboards across all systems including ERP systems, CRM systems, Google Analytics, and payroll systems to name a few.
Make Budgeting and Reporting Easy
As mentioned in a previous article about the Use of CPM Analytical Tools in the Budget Planning Process, a CPM solution facilitates a smooth and efficient budgeting and forecasting process across your organization. It also can help you save time and money by automating your financial and operational reporting. Streamlining your processes including assignments, workflows and approvals are much easier in a CPM solution than in a spreadsheet due to pre-built features specifically for these tasks.
Take Excel to the next level. Every company could needs a powerful and impactful financial reporting tool to speed up decisions to remain competitive in the industry. Report writers help companies analyze and manage their data without leaving any disruptions and faulty data. Given how popular Microsoft Excel is, it may be a shock that many people design their spreadsheets to manage critical business processes with very little to no audit and control features. This means that most spreadsheets have a poor foundation which leaves room for potential problems. Find a financial tool that offers the benefit of Excel-based reporting and form design including a database-driven storage and cloud-based architecture to make budgeting and reporting much easier and simpler. Modern CPM solutions, like BI360, have powerful Excel report designer add-ins that connect to a cloud portal where all end users enter budgets and run reports in a browser environment with zero footprint on their local PC.
Budgeting can be a time-consuming process for many companies, but it is necessary to communicate the importance of a budget to the entire company and how it supports strategic goals. Every organization should find a solution that has customizable budgeting templates to help organize and deploy your budget according to specific industry best practices. For instance, advanced budgeting should include capital budgeting by asset, personnel budgeting by position, revenue budgeting by quantitative drivers, expense budgeting by detail, and user definable input forms, workflow and comments.
Analyze the Finished Budget with Dashboards
Most CPM solutions now offer modules that make it easier and faster to deploy and maintain your dashboards. The ideal solution provides a user-friendly, pre-configured cloud data warehouse that has various data connectors. Consolidating all of your data sources with a modern data warehouse makes it faster and easier to design dashboards and to analyze your data with powerful dashboard solutions like Microsoft’s Power BI. By combining a reporting tool like BI360 with a leading analytics and dashboard tool like Power BI, you will get the best of CPM and BI. Learn more to see how these two Microsoft Azure-based solutions will help you.
Look at Product Reviews
It is advised to review software products and even compare corporate performance management (CPM) and reporting tools on review sites like G2 to see which product is the best solution for you and your company. If you are struggling to find a CPM tool that fills in all of the blanks, Solver has a team of professionals that can get your company started.
