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Sage Budgeting and Planning

Sage Budgeting and Planning can provide all this and more. A proactive software product designed specifically for the budgeting and forecasting process, Sage Budgeting and Planning offers significant business predictive improvement.

Sage Budgeting and Planning

Sage 100 Accounting and Finance shortens planning cycles, features spreadsheets like ease of use, integrates with enterprise data, is web enabled, and focuses on the benefit of analysis and the ability to course correct easily.

Redefining the Budgeting Process

In short, the goal of Sage Budgeting and Planning is process improvement within the planning environment accomplished by transforming data into meaningful information, streamlining the process and shortening decision-making times.

Accounting Process Improvement

Some of the major challenge areas are highlighted below for companies during their planning cycle and how Sage Budgeting and Planning works to improve the process.

Time

One of the most costly aspects of planning for most companies is the time involved. Putting together an effective forecast can take weeks or even months, depending on your company’s scope and needs.

Sage Budgeting and Planning addresses the time-consuming components of planning head on to reduce your planning time dramatically and increase the time available for strategic analysis.

Sage does this by enabling collaboration across all lines of your business through web-based input channels and the ability to seamlessly combine budget submissions from multiple departments, divisions, or companies. It also allows you to instantly and accurately access both historical and current data from your enterprise wide database sources without importing or rekeying. Combine this with a familiar spreadsheet look and feel (for quicker learning) and the ability to roll your budget numbers forward and update your time periods (and associated data) quickly and easily, and the time savings add up rapidly and repeatedly year after year.

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Forecasting With Efficiency and Accuracy

Flexibility

Automating your planning process won’t do you any good if you have to conform to someone else’s idea of what’s important. Sage Budgeting and Planning offers full flexibility of setup to make the product work with your existing goals and systems.

You can design and create your own set of templates from which to build your plan for each of your companies. In addition, you can draw planning periods and your chart of accounts directly from your general ledger in order to automate your setup and keep your planning consistent with your existing business practices.

“If you have to forecast, forecast often.”

Edgar R. Fiedler
in The Three Rs of Economic Forecasting — Irrational, Irrelevant and Irreverent, June 1977.

Challenges at Each Stage

Sage Budgeting and Planning has the ability to use the numbers as they exist, with support for full segmentation of your chart of accounts. If you add, remove, or inactivate any accounts, Sage Budgeting and Planning can automatically recognize those changes. In addition, you can link to such enterprise data such as HR/payroll, capital/fixed assets, customer information, sales data, and more. This allows you to forecast based on the business dimensions important to your company and to utilize all the information available to you.

Reach

While most budget managers would in many ways rather handle the entire process themselves, they realize that many others need to be involved in order to give the numbers credibility and generate buy-in across the company.

In fact, for a true and accurate forecast to be developed, line managers must be included. With the Web View product in Sage Budgeting and Planning, this process is not only possible, it’s easy. Line managers and others can access the budget process over the web with full security available to control what they view and participate in.

Once their input is complete, Sage Budgeting and Planning can consolidate the data and roll it up to higher level planning sheets.

Accuracy

Of course, no planning process is worth the time or effort invested if it isn’t accurate. With Sage Budgeting and Planning, since data is seamlessly incorporated from your enterprise software, everyone is always working with the most current and accurate numbers.

Also, since it’s easy to involve others but still have security and control over the process, you can plan down to the detail level necessary to provide you and your process with the numbers you need.

Analysis

So you now have your numbers, one big question that’s often ignored is, what do you do with them? Many times this most important stage of the process is ignored or given the short shrift due to the time involvement in assembling the forecast.

Sage Budgeting and Planning not only frees up more time during the planning cycle but also provides the tools necessary to do in-depth analysis throughout the process. You can analyze alternative business plans, compare line and business unit performance, examine sales and expense variances, and make allocations based on key business drivers. You can create an unlimited number of revisions so that you can try numerous “what if” scenarios. In addition, Sage Budgeting and Planning provides a multidimensional analysis tool that allows users to interact directly with their budgeting and planning data and a graphical manner.

Advanced analysis capabilities can also allow users to decompose aggregate values and drill-down on specific data elements.

Sage 100 Accounting and Finance Summary

While most companies have a budgeting and forecasting process in place and willingly acknowledge the value and necessity of such an exercise, many are utilizing tools that don’t support their company’s level of sophistication or size.

The result can be a budget process that takes far too long, delivers inaccurate numbers, and frustrates those involved. Automation solutions exist for this process that can be effective, but it’s important to focus on those that are flexible enough to incorporate a company’s actual budget process.

The best solutions should be integrated and open to allow the incorporation of a company’s general ledger and ERP data without rekeying or cumbersome transfers. This data should retain its native format to allow for proper use and easy transfer back into the general ledger application.

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“Many times analysis, the most important stage, of the process is
ignored or given the short shrift due to the time involvement in
assembling the forecast.”

The application should also be powerful enough to allow for any formulas and calculations necessary to automate the process and return accurate forecast information based on assumption models generated by the budget manager. This should all be done utilizing a process that can streamline the timeline involved, be adjusted for changing assumptions and realities, be rolled forward as necessary without the need to recreate, and offers multiple what-if scenarios and multidimensional data analysis.

Sage Budgeting and Planning offers all this and more. With full support of the business improvement cycle it can help shorten timelines and provide accurate intuitive information to improve and streamline the budget process.

You can quickly gain control of the entire process and be able to make quicker, more informed business decisions. You’ll also be able to encourage collaboration across your enterprise, tie budgeting activities to performance, and be better able to predict your business improvement.

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