Automated Forecasting with Jet Reports
April 3, 2021
Budgeting Problems That Companies Face in Fiscal Planning
- Global Data 365
Organizations all over the world are putting in more effort than ever before to achieve long-term, successful growth. Fiscal planning, which includes compiling, tracking, and reviewing a company’s income, expenditures, debt, and capital estimates for implementation in the annual budget, is a result of that growth strategy. It’s a big organizational challenge that happens once a year but typically lasts longer than expected.
If you ask every big company’s CFO, they will tell you that during this time of organizing staff, aligning numbers, and handling approvals, they’ve probably missed a few nights (or weeks) of sleep. They are the ones that are largely responsible for determining priorities, benchmarking business results, making changes, and implementing the budget company-wide, even though there are several different participants in the budgeting process leading to budgeting problems. It goes without saying that without the correct structures and processes in place, this can be a challenging time.
Budgeting and Fiscal Planning
Budgeting is necessary to direct daily revenue and expenditure decisions and assign resources. Long-term fiscal planning needs resources and support for financial targets. Although budgeting is intended to keep the business on track and find areas for change, the fact is that it is not a simple job. Rather than focusing on profitability and competitiveness, the budgeting process is often time-consuming and labor-intensive, with little return on investment. Tackling down the root issues, we conducted research and listed the top eight budgeting issues that most businesses face while preparing their fiscal year.
Time
Coordinating, editing, and consolidating various budget contributors’ versions of the same static spreadsheet takes a long time. Many CFOs have reported spending upwards of 250 hours on the budgeting process itself, from time spent reinforcing numbers to missed hours spent tracking down individual budget participants.
Communication
Before, during, and after the budgeting phase, there seem to be a lot of moving parts in a business. Budget developers, contributors, and approvers must all provide feedback at each point, but many businesses lack a tool to facilitate collaboration. They end up budgeting in silos, with no collaboration with other departments or a clear end goal in sight.
Complexity
Trying to deal with deadlines and unanticipated adjustments is another issue that many budget owners face throughout the multi-layered budgeting process. Any change or alteration to a budget result in a complex back and forth hassle of redoing numbers, responding to questions, and re-sending spreadsheets, which should be an easy fix.
Flexibility
When developing a budgeting document for all managers in an organization, it’s crucial that the form or spreadsheet they must fill out be structured and simple to comprehend. The problem is that unregulated spreadsheets lack the structure and marking needed for all budget participants. As a result, many people become engrossed in the information and find it difficult to provide correct answers.
Accuracy
Most businesses end up depending on manual data entry and procedures to put together 30 to 100 Excel files (each with different versions). Manual processes are notorious for causing human error, inconsistencies, and a lack of control since there is no easy way to filter down the numbers.
Optimization
Monitoring and changing the budget during the year is an effective business practice that contributes to increased profits and productivity. But, due to technical limitations and the manual labor needed to combine actuals and budgets, many businesses do not use it.
Cost
The cumulative cost of several annual budgeting projects will stack up once all the time and money that the six budgeting issues above consume are added together. Aside from the labour costs associated with inefficient procedures, many businesses are unaware of the value that good budgeting and fiscal planning can bring to the table.
Value
Perceived importance is one of the most critical factors in the budgeting process. Is the money you spend on planning and budgeting worth it? Operating managers should be able to make informed choices that are in line with the company’s overall financial priorities thanks to fiscal planning.
Key Takeaways for Fiscal Planning
At Global Data 365, we have learned these budgeting problems from our monitoring and analytics customers time and time again. As a result, with our new budgeting tools, we want to improve the way you budget. Our budgeting system is a simple, adaptable, and simple-to-use fiscal planning solution that manages and streamlines the budgeting process in Excel and on the web from more than 140 ERPs. Users can use their existing Excel skills to transform the budgeting process into an easily controlled, systematic process that can be completed in half the time with traditional Excel integration and an interactive web portal.
Here’s how we can help you gain more control over your processes and make your next budgeting period easier:
– By eliminating manual processes and disparate structures, you can save time and money on financial planning.
– Easily create, compile, and report on the budgets on a single forum for budget owners and contributors.
– With planned, automated workflows, you can cut the budget timeline in half.
– For simplified budget and actual reporting, import data directly from over 140 ERPs.
– Improve financial efficiency across departments by increasing productivity with fast, reliable budget numbers.
Budgeting tool that is both affordable and versatile, and that works the way people want a financial planning tool to work. Businesses can reduce the budgeting process, produce more reliable numbers, increase financial results and efficiency, and make better decisions in half the time.
If you’d like to gain control over your budgeting problems, schedule a demo with us today!
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