You are not alone if you’re designing and managing budgets in Excel today. You are also not alone if you’re struggling to make Excel a successful method for doing so.
Usually, budgeting using spreadsheets is less successful and hinders teamwork. It’s error-prone as well. Excel is a powerful tool for personal efficiency, but it lacks the requisite capabilities to create the detailed, thorough budgets needed by executive management, the board or lenders.
Here are six signs that your organization might be outgrowing Excel for budgeting and its need of a NetSuite solution provider.
The Budgeting Process Takes Too Much Time
Budgeting often involves multiple manual steps in Excel. Usually, it starts with uploading financial statements from the accounting system, then cutting and pasting the data through various Excel files into the desired format, rolling up that information, updating formulas and links, creating revenue and cost estimates, updating predictions, creating real vs. budget reports, which must always be reviewed for errors, and finally, emailing files.
Moreover, in Excel, the budgeting process is both manual and time-consuming. It is hard to handle last-minute changes to Excel files and it is easy to forget to update links or formulas. Boards and CFOs rely on having the right numbers, and mistakes reduce their confidence and might lead to mistaken choices.
There Are Too Many Versions Of Files
Budget templates in Excel are planned, exchanged and collected manually, which contributes to problems with version control. Several versions make it difficult to locate the latest updates to a document which place extra pressure on the team responsible for budgeting. You end up with mistakes and added troubleshooting and auditing without version control.
Limited Collaboration
If the budget process is not well defined, finance teams often fail to get the correct level of department managers’ involvement and buy-in. Passing spreadsheets back and forth makes removing rows and cells and splitting formulas and links all too easy for people. This coordination process is entirely disconnected and contributes to inefficiency, failures and poor awareness of improvements being made.
The lack of an audit trail makes it harder for the root of errors and inaccuracies to be investigated. Finance ends up spending much of the time only testing figures that are up-to-date and specific.
Information Is Accidentally Shared With Others
Did you just give the salary details file to an employee? Budgets contain confidential details, such as specific expenses and wages for various departments. It can be too easy to accidentally email the wrong file to the wrong people or allow access to the wrong shared drivers while you are using multiple Excel spreadsheets, particularly if you are tired from spending all night working on the latest and biggest budget.
Reporting Is Delayed
A deadline was most likely missed by the time you downloaded unformatted financial reports from the accounting system each month, cut and pasted the data into Excel, rolled up the data, and then sent out each spreadsheet to the appropriate stakeholder. That also means that you have made sure to search for errors in the whole process to ensure that the final reports are related to what is in the source systems.
This makes it difficult for decision-makers to assess expenditure, prepare accordingly, and make strategic decisions about the company’s financial health and growth.
How A NetSuite Provider Can Help
For your budgeting process, even one of these signs might be enough justification to step away from Excel and begin contemplating a budgeting solution. But the first question that may come to mind is whether it is hard and costly to configure and maintain budget solutions.
An efficient, but simple-to-use-and-deploy budgeting solution is provided by Aarialife, your trusted NetSuite partner in India and Dubai. Your financial data is automatically pulled from NetSuite into the budgeting tool with pre-configured data integration with NetSuite General Ledger, manual data entry is deleted, you always have the latest data at your fingertips, and there is no need to think about who got what data.
Plus, you can easily include anyone in the company who wants to be involved in the process of budgeting. This approach provides the coordination, control and visibility required to use one end-to-end approach to help manage the full budgeting process.
So, if you’re looking to optimize and streamline your budgeting process, it’s time to contact us at Aarialife, the best NetSuite partner in Dubai.
