If your planning and reporting cycles are too long or consume far too much of your team’s time, investing in an integrated budgeting and reporting platform, such as Corporate Planner, could provide valuable cost, resource, and time-saving benefits, as well as functionality that traditional budgeting applications, such as Excel, cannot offer.
Multiple User Access
The downside of using spreadsheets to create reports and budgets is that only one user can access them at once. When collaborating on a shared spreadsheet remotely, a frustrating situation can arise in which duplicate versions of the spreadsheets are created when one user tries to save the document while another is working on it on a different device. This makes collaboration more time-consuming and error-prone, as well as less efficient. With a cloud-based commercial budgeting and reporting platform like Corporate Planner, the frustrating days of waiting for another user to finish working on the platform are over.
A good cloud-based application will allow multiple users to plan and work on budgets and financial reports simultaneously, avoiding duplicate files, minimising the risk of human error, and establishing a single source of truth on which to base forecasts and financial plans.
Encourages Collaboration
A commercial budgeting and reporting platform saves time by making all the data your team needs to create accurate reports available in one central location, accessible via the cloud from any device. When deadlines are due, this can make the difference between completion on time and costly delays.
Corporate Planner, for example, allows users to store, access, and update their data through reports and dashboards, so that others within your team or in different departments can access it and work on it collaboratively. Having a single version of the truth – automatically updated and synchronised on each user’s device – eliminates the need for multiple copies of the same information to be duplicated on local devices and cuts back on back-and-forth email communication, saving time and improving workplace efficiency.
Import Data
Unlike Excel spreadsheets, which rely on you entering data and formulae manually, a budgeting and reporting platform like Corporate Planner automates the process of importing and consolidating data from multiple sources (e.g., your ERP or CRM) – making the budget more precise and efficient. The platform will standardise import data formats for you, saving you the time-intensive process of exporting your data into an intermediate application first, before you can even upload it into your system.
When you are pressed for time to turn out a report or budget within the deadline, the added pressure of manual data imports can make omissions and errors more likely. With your manual data entry requirements reduced and having more time available to spend on budget calculations, there is less chance of errors and duplicates slipping into your dataset, so you can be confident that your budgets and reports will be accurate.
Automated Forecasting
Corporate Planner’s automated forecasting tools make effective use of imported data and can generate realistic forecasts whenever required – in a fraction of the time required to produce reports that depend on manual processing. A wide variety of customised financial reports, sales forecasts, and budget calculations can be created in minutes from your dashboard using a suite of intuitive reporting tools and can be presented to your stakeholders in a range of graphs and visual formats.
Rapid Analysis
Budgeting and reporting software allows you to evaluate your business data quickly and dynamically, so you can compare the results with previous forecasts, financial years, or investment scenarios, and quickly understand key costs and income drivers.
Contact Account-Ability To Find Out More
Corporate Planner is a complete budgeting, forecasting, and reporting software that will help your business to save time and money through more efficient and incisive data management.
To find out more, please call us on 01242 578966 or request a free, no-obligation demonstration of our award-winning software.
Image source: Canva