Budgeting, planning, forecasting, modeling… I’m guessing these are not your favorite activities. Most people we talk to about their budgeting processes get visibly frustrated just discussing it. Planning for a whole year for an entire organization or even just a department, a project, or division can be aggravating, tedious, and overwhelming at times, depending on the tool you use to budget.
On top of that, it seems to get more difficult to adequately plan for an entire calendar year due to the instability of costs related to things like turnover or cost of goods that can truly change overnight. These changes in the business realm can drastically shift how expenses and revenue actually fall, altering the way corporate decision-makers want to move forward to stay competitive. Despite the frustration and challenges that budgeting brings, planning is so important to the success of your company. Budgeting and forecasting help us live within our means in order to stay afloat – and frankly, it does not have to be as difficult as it traditionally has been.
Whether you are focused on the next fiscal year or working on a project, budgeting and/or forecasting is necessary, but it does not have to be as tedious as you have known it to be in the past. Like most enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, Microsoft Dynamics NAV has native financial reporting and budgeting functionalities, but if your company is of any healthy size, these tools are not going to meet all of your needs to effectively plan for an entire year. However, there are plenty of independent software vendor (ISV) solutions for budgeting that are that offer the familiarity of formatting and coding within the globally used spreadsheet program. Budgeting with a proprietary interface, much like Dynamics NAV’s built-in tool, tends to require more time to learn the product because the formulas are not what most people are used to using in Excel, lacking the flexibility to create business user friendly budget templates. And that’s not all.
There are lots of budgeting options that will streamline and empower your corporate decision-making in this global era of business. While Excel add-in tools have been around for a while and continue to improve, web budgeting is on the horizon as an option to collaborate and contribute to a budget or forecast from anywhere you have an internet connection, fine-tuning and accelerating decisions with more accurate projections. You also have the option of pulling your data from an online analytical processing .
To continue learning more about your options for multi-year budgets and rolling forecasts with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, read the rest of this article .
by Solver, Inc.
