This is part 3 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 on budgeting best practices that will look at the challenges of the budgeting process and how to solve them. Catch up on last week’s post, Bad Data or Bad Spreadsheets.

The right budget can give you control and insight

Positioning your business for growth requires both control and insight.  You need to be able to respond quickly in order to keep your business on the right path and headed in the right direction.  Budgets are an important part of the process; however, time is not on your side.

Using outdated information or spending too much time with spreadsheet errors can diminish both the control and insight you are trying to achieve. During the planning, budgeting and forecasting process, key managers collect important data in order to make plans for the upcoming year, or longer.  The more people involved, the longer the process can take.

In addition to delaying the process, the data that is being used by different managers can originate from different sources and from dissimilar time periods.  Using outdated, inaccurate data can skew the numbers, making it difficult to plan the year ahead and work within forecasted budgets.

A centralized budgeting solution can help

Implement better business budgeting solutions and create timely, precise budgets and forecasts that support your strategic goals.  Download 21 Ways Your Budgeting Process Puts Your Business at Risk to learn how to streamline the planning, budgeting and forecasting process.

A centralized budgeting solution can add time-saving automation, starting with linking your budgeting spreadsheets directly to data sources.  When it comes to corporate performance management, your managers can use the real-time data available within your business management solution instead of looking up figures from files or older spreadsheets.  Not only can you save time when preparing budgets and forecasts, the real-time data adds to the accuracy of your plans.

A robust budgeting solution can also prevent the confusion that often results with multiple versions of spreadsheets.  As spreadsheets are emailed from manager to manager, new data can be entered or altered and new versions of spreadsheets are then passed along.  A centralized budgeting solution offers one solution that managers can access and review, which eliminates the confusion of multiple spreadsheets.  In addition, audit control and reason codes can highlight changing data and provide insight into why data was changed.

Don’t waste time with old data and multiple versions of spreadsheets.  Download the eBook created by True Sky, 21 Ways Your Budgeting Process Puts Your Business at Risk, and contact us to learn how to streamline the planning, budgeting and forecasting process so you can move forward with a timely, accurate version of your budgets and forecasts.