This concludes our blog series on understanding the risks of your current planning, budgeting and forecasting process. We’ve examined the challenges of the budgeting process and how to solve them. Not caught up? Read last week’s post, Excel for Budgeting, Don’t Just Default to the Standard Spreadsheet.

When it comes to the future of your business, you don’t want to leave anything to chance.  In order to position your business for strategic growth, you need the support of your departmental managers and other business units along with a budgeting process that everyone agrees on.  It may be time to breathe new life into your budgeting process by replacing inadequate spreadsheets with a centralized budgeting solution.

The entire budgeting process is often fraught with risk and subject to common mistakes and unnecessary complications.  Frustrated by time-consuming processes and under pressure to provide estimated budgets to upper management, your team may rush through their decisions, overlooking important metrics or underestimating other metrics.  Mistakes in planning can lead to incomplete budgets which can hinder business growth and success.  Create a budget that works and one that can support your goals.

You can streamline the planning, budgeting and forecasting process by implementing a centralized business budgeting software solution.  Download 21 Ways Your Budgeting Process Puts Your Business at Risk to learn how templates, workflows, and other automations can reduce the time spent on compiling and entering data.

• Senior management can create customized budgeting templates for each department or business unit to use in preparing budgets.
• These templates provide consistency with planning and forecasting individual departmental budgets which make it easier to prepare an enterprise-wide budget.
• Workflows automatically route draft budgets to the appropriate people for review and approval.
• As an end result, you and your teams can create budgets that meet corporate strategic goals and that can be followed successfully by individual departments or business units.

Reduce the chance for simple data errors, engage your managers in the planning process, and introduce a new level of control and insight into the planning, budgeting and forecasting process by replacing aging spreadsheets with a more efficient solution, like True Sky.  Download our eBook, 21 Ways Your Budgeting Process Puts Your Business at Risk and contact us for more information about using a centralized budgeting solution to create budgets that work and that support your efforts for your business growth strategies.