How to automate budget management

If you are unhappy with how your finance staff tackles budgeting, act on it now. Manual budgeting never ends well. In the long process of creating, disbursing, collecting and merging records, manually, errors and omissions do arise. These can be costly errors that could have an impact on overall business performance. Are you still using Excel spreadsheets? If so, you should shift to an advanced budget management method that could manage your spreadsheets more effectively. This will eradicate several challenges that your finance team has been facing. For instance, it will save time that gets wasted when your staff has to reorganize all invoices so they can have a similar format. As well, the amounts of emails and phone calls that were earlier exchanged to establish the status of every budgeting task will reduce.

Three things to expect when you automate your budget workflows

The most appropriate budget management system will provide a number of benefits to the user:

1. Central repository. It will create a central repository unit where the whole company’s records can be safely kept. The laborious process of manually confirming whether the data in the spreadsheet is true or false will end. The budgeting tool will consolidate everything in a single place for easier comparisons and future retrieval.
2. Delegation made smooth. The automated budget control tool enables the management to delegate new tasks and deadlines to certain individuals. After that, they could monitor each individual’s progress without moving an inch away from their office desk. The software displays the status of work all through the day, enabling the supervisory staff to track everything easily than if they were doing it manually.
3. Reporting simplified. A perfect budget management tool enables the top management team to make better business decisions and data validation rules. Also, it enables proper control of the type of data that employees can enter into the system. Since the system consists of an audit trail that can record the entire user activity, the top management can make comparisons between the new and the older manual system.

Sounds nice? See how your automated budget workflow might look like:

Get a 30-day trial!

Characteristics of a great software system

As you begin your search, remember that the best budget management system offers certain characteristics. These are the ones you should seek for to ensure that you spend your money on one of the best solutions.  Hence, look for this:

• A system that could offer a central data repository unit that keeps everything safe and ready for future retrieval.
• A tool that could eliminate email overload, version control and related issues by offering an automatic way of depositing finished templates into the central data repository.
• A tool that allows the managers to track users’ activities toward the accomplishment of the budgeting process. If they identify issues, they can have them addressed fast so as to keep the process going.
• An intelligent budget management system that instantly displays changes made to various spreadsheets that arise from every department. This can simplify the roles played by your finance team as they would no longer write emails or make calls to clarify things from various individuals.
• A software system that could save both time and money by eliminating hours of manual budgeting activities. Via the audit trail, the tool can facilitate timely comparisons as users only need to click to see what has changed on various spreadsheets.
• A budget management system that can offer accuracy a hundred percent of the time. This can be so beneficial to the finance team, as it can determine when a project might exceed the initially allotted finances and time.

How operations might get better

As soon as you buy the top financial management software for your finance team, a few business challenges will disappear forever. For instance, your staff will spend less time writing and sending emails. This is because the software will display the queries they would like answered or solved and those responsible will automatically see them. Manual budget processing will greatly decrease because the software will automate the workflow. Additionally, the budget management system will give the management control over the status of individual tasks and their contribution toward the completion of ongoing projects. Above all, data inaccuracy will decrease and this will improve overall business performance. Now is the best time to automate your budgeting workflows. With our Comindware Tracker system, you can enhance your budgeting in a snap. All you should do is request us for a 30-day risk-free trial.

Get a 30-day trial!

Maria Komarova is a Product Marketing Analyst at CMW Lab – a global software company delivering innovative Business Operations Management solutions enabling performance and efficiency optimization.