If you’re like most organizations, the annual budget is your guideline for how you spend for the rest of the year. You (and your team) spend countless hours logging numbers to come up with a viable budget that will last all year long. Your corporate budget planning needs to be seamless – and we’ve got the tips to make it easy.

Here are 5 ways you can keep control of your corporate budget planning process and not overspend:

• Get the right people involved in producing the budget. One of the most effective ways to do this is with software that is easy to use and allows you to roll out the budget to the person who knows most about the numbers. That being said, make sure that you don’t create budget templates catered solely to accountants – not all end users will think like they do.

• Forecast on a monthly basis. For most organizations, yearly budgeting does not work very well, so you need to be continually inputting and analysing data to reach an accurate financial truth. This also makes the year-end so much easier because the numbers have been crunched all year long.

• Simplify your process so it’s not a hassle. Too many individual spreadsheets lead to problems, especially when they can be changed by individual users throughout the process. Simplifying templates is the easiest way to do this. For example, consider reducing the amount of data presented to the user to the bare minimum required to get the job done or shade cells different colours to differentiate between cells requiring input from the user and cells that contain formulas or that are read-only.

• Tailor the process to the user, make it as easy as possible for them. For example, instead of one huge worksheet, break it into multiple worksheets with a tab for each specific area. For instance, have one tab for office expenses, one for travel expenses, one for marketing expenses, etc. This makes the templates easier to understand and helps the user focus since they are only dealing with one particular area at a time.

• Understand your business drivers. Corporate budget planning depends on more than knowing just the top line numbers so be sure to understand and analyze all drivers and include them. This means such considerations as employees, raw materials, overhead, etc., as well as any changes that may occur over the course of the year, such as shipping increases or even a new labour contract.

Want your corporate budget planning to pay off in 2017? True Sky can make the entire budgeting and forecasting process easier – and far more efficient. Find out more by visiting www.truesky.com today.