How a Worfklow Tool can Greatly Improve Your Budgeting Process
Most companies today use Excel as their main budgeting tool. Although it is powerful, it has its limitations. One big one that is important to the budgeting process, is that it doesn’t offer any sort of workflow tool. A great budget process is one that has various controls such as rules, approvals, and a workflow system. If these aren’t included, the whole process can take a lot longer to complete, and it can also be erroneous, causing frustration for all involved.
Main reasons finance and accounting employees, along with other stakeholders in the budgeting process find the process frustrating include: it takes a very long time to complete, there are too many different files (workbooks) to manage, it is hard to collaborate with team members to know or remember where certain numbers came from, and some of these numbers may be outdated due to changing market and business conditions.
If your team and organization are experiencing these same frustrations, it might be time to implement workflow automation software into your budgeting process. It can help contributors know what they have to submit, to whom and by when, along with what any next steps may be. This removes the need for many confusing back and forth emails and phone calls between team members and managers/approvers. In turn, a large amount of time is saved, communication is more productive, and employees are happier.
Other ways workflow automation software can help your team include:
- Automatically capturing data so financial staff can focus more on analysis
- Integrating with existing systems, so there is no need for manual data re-entry (eliminating most human error)
- Creating ‘what-if’ scenarios, projecting possible future business scenarios
- Using rolling forecasts to spread out the budgeting workload over the whole fiscal year
Our workflow tool, True Sky, lets you view at a glance what manager needs to approve the budget, who still hasn’t seen it and what the next steps are. Plus, our tool uses Microsoft Excel, but allows you to work beyond its limitations. The interface is familiar for users, so minimal training is required and adoption is quite quick. True Sky’s workflow functionality results in easier collaboration, and more efficient processes/communication.
Want to learn more about True Sky? Contact us today for a free demo! Visit www.truesky.com or call us at 1 855 878 3759.
