This is part 2 of 12 in a blog series on understanding the risks of your current planning, budgeting and forecasting process. For the next few weeks, we’ll be posting a new article every Wednesday that will look at the challenges of the budgeting process and how to solve them with budgeting best practices. Catch up on last week’s post, Budgets are Important, Make Sure You’re Doing them Correctly!

Are you using Excel for budgeting?

How many times have you found errors in your spreadsheets for budgeting as you are analyzing financial data and planning your budget?  Trying to determine whether you have bad data or bad spreadsheets takes time, further aging your data and keeping you from moving forward with your business budgeting process.

Managers involved in the planning, budgeting and forecasting process often default to the use of spreadsheets.  Applications such as Microsoft Excel® provide a quick and easy way to enter and analyze financial figures.  However, according to MarketWatch, studies show that nearly 88% of spreadsheets have errors.  Users enter data that could be wrong from the very start or they can make typographical mistakes.  Additional errors can be found with formulas in the cells or with links between multiple spreadsheets.

Financial figures are often fluid and errors can be compounded in spreadsheets that are:

• Reviewed
• Changed
• Updated regularly

Errors can easily go unnoticed which can lead managers to make bad decisions based on data that they didn’t know was incorrect.

Gain control and insight into your budgeting process

Download 21 Ways Your Budgeting Process Puts Your Business at Risk to learn how a better budgeting solution can reduce the chance for data errors and improve the quality of data that you need during the planning, budgeting and forecasting process.  A centralized budgeting solution can provide greater control and insight over your data.  You can protect the integrity of your data by linking your solution to your data source.  When data is directly linked instead of entered repeatedly by your team, you can be confident that you are using real-time, accurate information for your budgeting process.

As your business grows, you may need to separate budgets and forecasts based on

• Divisions
• Locations
• Other interdependencies of your departments and functions.

However, you can still manage separate spreadsheets or budgets that remain linked to your centralized database.  Templates, security features, comments and other features offered in a more robust budgeting solution can provide greater control over data entered and changed without overburdening your IT team.

Don’t get stuck with bad data or bad spreadsheets.  Download 21 Ways Your Budgeting Process Puts Your Business at Risk to learn how a stronger budgeting solution can improve control, provide greater accuracy, and streamline the entire planning, budgeting and forecasting process. Contact us for more information about avoiding data and spreadsheet mistakes with a better budgeting solution.