The GP Budget Wizard is an easy-to-use out-of-the-box budgeting tool that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Excel, but is it really providing enough ROI for your team to keep using it?

Let's review the pros and cons:

• Pro: Free. The wizard comes standard in any Dynamics GP software purchase
• Con: Free is not always better. When budgets start to become cumbersome with multiple templates and numerous managers entering data, the budget wizard provides a nonexistent ROI (considering your time to be a valuable investment). There are a number of tools and solutions in the Dynamics community that will provide levels of automated functionality. You just need to find a balance between the price tag and the level of automation that your company needs.

 

• Pro: It can help create budget templates
• Con: Unfortunately for most, budget templates are often not standard across departments. Managers use different metrics for KPIs. As the variation in templates increase, so do time and effort put in by the accounting team.

 

• Pro: Seamlessly integrates with excel
• Con: *Only if the data is molded to fit the GP Wizard import template. This process becomes more cumbersome as your templates, data, and managers increase in size and complexity. This opens the door to copying and pasting from template to template, linking workbooks, and increased hours spent reconciling.

To summarize, the budget wizard is easy to use, but quite frankly most of the time it is just too simple.

If this type of simplicity fits your process, then keep on with the Wizard. However, if you need something more to streamline your process and start saving time, you may want to consider Full Circle Budget.

If any of the needs below resonate with your process and cannot be handled by the Wizard, please give us a call:

• Save Budget comments and supporting line item details
• Automate formatting of budget data templates
• Full audit trail of budgets

About Full Circle Budget

Full Circle Budget is an Excel add-in that processes budgets directly from Excel into Microsoft Dynamics

Contact: Joseph St Germain, (202) 770-3549 jstgermain@t3infosystems.com