Budgeting Systems

How we improve your budgeting systems

We create customized software to make your planning process run smoothly. Many components go into a smooth budget planning process. We provide high quality tools and best-practices advice to help the entire process be a success.

We create Excel-based budgeting systems that consolidate painlessly into a central database, marrying the best of spreadsheet flexibility to the security and control of a database. Updated reports are available in seconds. And all without spreadsheet links.

We construct highly customized input templates that cannot be modified by end users, but can easily be modified by Corporate if needs change during the budget process. We build workbooks with reporting and analysis detail that get the basics done easily and provide a framework for in-depth investigation.

We offer support with super-high availability and lightning responsiveness since know that budgeting problems need to be solved ASAP.

For many clients, we extend past budgeting itself and tie the general ledger results into the budgeting database to produce budget vs. actual reports to enable tracking towards budget targets.

How we work together to achieve success

To achieve the results above, we apply three main services:

System Design is the initial phase of a new project. Initial tasks involve understanding the details of how the company needs to budget, including how revenue is detailed by region or customer or product, how expenses are broken out by departments and accounts, how capital expenditures are itemized, getting lists of department and regions and their codes, etc.

Also critical is understanding the reports that need to be generated and how budgets will be compared to actuals in the upcoming year. The deliverable from this phase is a plan showing the different template types and their line items, a database scheme, and mockups of reporting templates.

We have been through this process dozens of times, and are very efficient consultants at getting the information needed and presenting alternatives to arrive at the optimal specification for your needs.

Implementation is the phase where the software is created. There is little interaction during this phase, and the key project management focus is on tracking progress against the schedule and avoiding feature creep so as to keep the project on schedule.

Our experience in building this type of software allows us to estimate the difficulty of features and to give the kind of honest feedback that helps clients stick to the important issues and avoid adding unnecessary bells and whistles.

Training and Support involves testing the system with Corporate and field users, producing documentation, training all users or training trainers, conducting special OLAP database training, installing database software, and transferring technical knowledge to key staff members.

Of course, we stick around during initial use of the system, as that's when most bugs are found (and easily fixed). Once the system goes into production, we often help release "updaters" which modify templates already sent out to the field while preserving all work users have already done.

As the budgeting process reaches its conclusion, we often help link the final budgets into the system used for financial reporting.

Next steps

If you think this service can help you achieve these results, contact us.