This is part 8 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. Catch up on last week’s post, Improve the Logic Behind Your Data.

Working with multiple budgets?

As your enterprise grows, the number of financial budgets you manage may also grow.  You may have a corporate budget in addition to budgets for multiple business units, locations, or other divisions.  Keeping tabs on individual financial activities and incorporating that data into a corporate budget can be challenging unless you have a solid plan and the support of a robust business management solution.

Spreadsheets have a crazy way of multiplying almost right before your eyes.  Employees may add or change data and create a new version of that spreadsheet to be passed around for review and approval.  Imagine multiplying the numerous versions of spreadsheets by “X” number of new business units. In short time, you could have dozens of spreadsheets, each containing data pertinent to your individual lines of business as well as the overall corporation.

Maintain control of your budget

Put a cap on replicating spreadsheets by implementing a centralized budgeting solution.  Download 21 Ways Your Budgeting Process Puts Your Business at Risk to learn how you can maintain multiple budgets within a single, company workbook.  Start by customizing data-entry templates for each of your business divisions that reflects the specific forecasts and budgetary needs for those divisions.  Employees from a specific business unit can enter and access their data from the centralized budgeting solution, which reduces the chances for replicating budgets.

You can also connect your individual business unit budgets into a single, corporate-wide budget to monitor key budget-related metrics or see how your company is performing as a whole.  Senior management can save time from having to sift through multiple versions of divisional spreadsheets, as well as trying to make sense of volumes of inconsistent data.  As your business grows, a centralized budgeting solution can make it easier to manage multiple budgets, without multiple headaches.

Download 21 Ways Your Budgeting Process Puts Your Business at Risk to see how you can create a company budget, with separate business unit budgets, without dozens of versions of spreadsheets.  Contact us to learn how to manage the budgeting process without the extra-large bottle of Advil on your desk.