Martin & Associates thinks it is fair to say that budgeting is not a task that most people enjoy, but it’s a necessary responsibility for the future of an organization. It also might be frustrating due to the traditional process of manually linking spreadsheets together. There’s good news though: third party BI software vendors are producing modern, consumer-driven planning solutions to upgrade your budgeting and forecasting processes. If your company is healthy and growing, your planning responsibilities are probably too complex for manually budgeting in Excel, so you ought to be looking at third party solutions to simplify, expedite, and improve your processes. The best budgeting tools of today enable you to supervise secure collaboration, while giving managers ownership of the budgets they have to maintain, without the traditional mess of logistics.
Planning for the financial future for most organizations typically involves several people working together to design a budget or forecast. Budgeting compares historical actual numbers to research-driven projections. Microsoft Excel is globally trusted and utilized, but it can fall short when it comes to the logistics of collaboration and contribution within the same workbook. A lot of organizations have stayed with Excel for planning processes, while others have been depending on Intacct’s native budgeting functionality, so an investment in an independent software vendor (ISV) product might seem excessive, considering the commitment to their current licensing costs. Maybe you are also thinking this could be some money you could avoid spending, but we’ll detail the pros you will enjoy if you choose to implement an ISV budgeting solution to enhance Intacct.
Third party budgeting software is more prominent than ever today, most likely due to the modernity, the security, the ease of use, and the flexibility to collaborate across the organization. You also have options. Some planning solutions are Excel-powered, some are web-based, and there are also hybrids, flexibly familiar with Excel formatting and mobile because of the internet’s ubiquity. The premier ISV tools also come equipped with dynamic accounting and business logic for easy-to-configure automation and templates business end users can reuse.
Martin & Associates has noticed the ISV software vendor marketplace take off because third party manufacturers have heard consumer demands and delivered more efficient, more secure planning processes. Some of the better budgeting software empowers the budget manager to distribute ownership to department supervisors, inviting them to have a role in the budgeting process. This allows them to manage budgets they have helped to create, while avoiding lengthy e-mail threads, which oftentimes have heavy attachments of Excel files and then have to be linked together. Budget managers can now facilitate a streamlined, inclusive, and collaborative budgeting process. And it’s not too good to be true. The return on your investment can be measured in time, money, and even team morale.
To continue learning more about budgeting solutions for Intacct, read the rest of this article here.
