Recap of the Session:
Budgeting Process
In a typical budgeting process the following questions would be asked: how are we going to generate a consistent budget template? With respect to the number of departments or cost centers that you may have. What is the most effective way to share that with the rest of the team? Whether it will be x number of individuals each of them representing multiple departments/cost centers, or each department/call center has their own manager; this potentially can be hundreds and hundreds of call centers. What (if any) is the best way to review that information and get it back into Sage 300? If you step back and take a look, the entire budgeting process can be broken down or summarized by these four steps:
Along the way we have challenges, so how do we get a consistent budget template? If you have 5, 10, 15 budget centers or cost centers, inevitably you probably will get 10 or 15 different templates back. What does that do? Well, that makes it difficult for you to find when you try to consolidate that information, and more importantly, you will have to manually manipulate or massage the information to get it back into Sage 300. As we know, our budgeting or majority of budgeting processes are time-sensitive and have a fixed timeline. It's not as if you have nothing else to do every day, which means that it takes extra time for you to prepare, verify and complete the budget. Like other BI solutions, you end up spending time pulling and pushing data from your ERP, rather than focusing on the analysis side of the exercise.
However, today this process is all manual, and that is why a lot of clients have ultimately given up on having the budget in Sage 300. They prepare the budget outside in Excel and cause a scenario where budget and actuals are in two different places; two silos of data.
Why WisePlanner?
It's very simple, the WisePlanner Tool was designed with those four particular steps in mind, its key focus is to minimize and reduce the manual steps of getting data in and out of Sage 300. This tool allows you to work within Excel to build your budget, enter data and have that information ultimately feedback into Sage 300. In terms of training, it's very minimal, once this is installed it is ready to use for your budgeting process. Summary of key benefits:
- A simple application that takes away manual steps of getting data out and into Sage
- Let’s you work in Excel - build any formulas that you need for your budget numbers
- Limited to no training - install and ready to be used for your budgeting process
- It provides a data warehouse that lets you build reports on budget revisions with your Sage Intelligence & Sage Enterprise Intelligence tools.
Key Features of WisePlanner
Define Business Rules
Create New Templates
Template Status
Create Template Rules
Template Filters & Segments
Include Reference Columns
Group Data
Launch Budget Sheet
Excel Budget Template
Excel Add in and Real-Time Integration to Data Warehouse
Considerations for Selecting the Right Solution
- What do you need in the budgeting/ forecasting solution?
- Do you have business units and Business Unit Managers responsible for their budgets?
- Do you need to budget below the GL account?
- Do you need budgeting beyond the GL?
