We’ve all worked at companies that used highly specialized budgeting software. And while that type of software can seem necessary at times, usually it creates a lot more problems than it solves.

For example, what if you’re not in the finance department? You still need to enter budget items at the end of the month, but figuring out how to do it takes up half your morning. You could get training on the system, but since you only use it once a month, and for only two or three tasks…well, it’s easy to see why that training could get overlooked.

Even for people in the finance department, budgeting software is often complex, confusing, and inflexible. It can mean learning a whole set of rules that apply to just one software system.

To us, that just doesn’t make sense. Why make the budget planning process any harder than it already is? Why not use a system that most of us became familiar with while in our first jobs, if not in college?

That’s why we decided to develop the True Sky interface using Microsoft Excel . Excel has so many benefits as a software tool—it’s relatively easy to learn, it has amazing functionality, and it’s versatile enough for any company to use.

And when we added our own specialized functions to it—like forecasting, security, and permissions, for example—well, in our humble opinion, we created a tool that unifies the best of both Excel and budgeting software.

The benefits of Excel as a budgeting tool

People have been singing Excel’s praises for decades, since it was first popularized in the 1980s. What makes Excel so useful is that it’s so versatile. It’s a great program for something as simple as a family budget, or something more complex, like the annual budget for a small business with several departments.

Another benefit, of course, is the familiarity of the system. Most people have a working knowledge of Excel—at least enough to fill in a few numbers on a spreadsheet. It may not sound important, but for a business, using software that doesn’t require extensive training can save huge amounts of time and money. It can mean the difference between having functionality from day one of implementation, versus having to troubleshoot problems for the first couple of weeks. As every CFO knows, that time spent fixing problems means a lot of lost productivity.

Of course, there are some things that Excel just can’t do. True Sky fills in these gaps.

The benefits of True Sky as a budgeting tool

We’re specialists in the office of the CFO, so we know the headaches that CFOs deal with when it comes to business budgeting software. Our goal with True Sky was to simplify the budgeting process, and we do that through four different areas:

• Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting
• Monitoring and Reporting
• Dashboards
• Analytics

With budgeting, planning, and forecasting, for example, we made it easier for companies to access old versions of the budget, as well as develop multiple “what-if” budgeting scenarios just by changing a few variables.

With monitoring and reporting, our goal was to allow companies easy, intuitive access to their data any time they needed it. True Sky lets users pull any kind of report you could need, from inventory reports, to sales reports, balance sheets, and more.

Our dashboards are designed to encourage easy data access as well, and to allow users to extract from that data every bit of usable information they can get. Because True Sky promotes rolling forecasting over annual budgeting, it’s vital for users to be able to see the most up-to-date information they have. That’s what our dashboards make possible.

And finally, True Sky’s analytics build on this data-driven system to allow users to see the drivers that are helping or hindering the business’s success. In addition, True Sky makes trends visible, enhancing your business’s ability to make informed decisions about where it’s going, while seeing at a glance where it’s been.

If your business is ready to take its budgeting to the next level, all while using a system that your employees already know, contact us today! Learn how a budgeting and forecasting software, like True Sky’s, can reduce training time, therefore helping you streamline your budgeting and forecasting process.