How to Avoid a Budgeting Grease Fire

Budgeting is a time consuming and complicated process for any company. But when you’re talking about an international, distributed organization, it can be downright apocalyptic: different budgeting models, locally managed spreadsheets, individual differences in background data and calculations. Imagine being the corporate finance manager in charge of gathering, consolidating and deciphering that budget information.
Typically, I’ve found that these types of large, distributed companies could vastly improve their budgeting processes (and save a lot of headaches) if their budgeting solution addressed three key requirements:

1)  Excel-based: It’s the program of choice for any financial professional. And since you’re talking about different managers with different levels of computer and technical experience, Excel covers the bases for everyone.

2)  Retention of legacy data: No one can afford to lose years of valuable budget models and background data, only to start from scratch with a new system. When implementing a new budgeting system, be sure it can address legacy data retention.

3)  Complete version control: While companies want to retain their legacy data, they also need to be able to eliminate the macros and other complexities in the old budget models that led to higher risks of wrong data in the first place. They also need to enable various unique sub-models to comply with localized requirements throughout their business units.
Budgeting solutions like BI360 are simpler, more secure, and much more efficient. Furthermore, they greatly reduce the time involved in the normal budget-planning process. These budgeting solutions offer more visibility into the process as well, giving managers at the regional level better control, collaboration, and insight into the numbers that matter.
Check out more benefits of BI360’s budgeting solution here.