3 Budgeting Tools in Microsoft Dynamics GP

Often when people think of budgeting and planning for their business needs, they see it as a restrictive exercise.  However, setting and maintaining your budget can be a strategic exercise that helps you achieve your goals.  There are three tools within Microsoft Dynamics GP that can help turn your budgeting from drudgery to strategy:

Excel

Since it is the most popular budgeting software in the world, odds are that Excel plays a major role in your budgeting already.  However, if you are doing you budgeting completely in Excel, and not integrating it with your Dynamics GP data, you are missing out.  By using Excel based budgeting within Dynamics GP, you can eliminate Excel links and macros, easily create multiple revisions, and create custom reports in Management Reporter, all while keeping your data in one single location.

Forecaster

Microsoft Forecaster is an affordable powerful budgeting and planning application that can help you gain better control over the entire process by pushing the budgeting responsibility and accountability to the managers with an automated workflow and approval process.  With Forecaster, you can accurately budget for Human Resources expenses, expedite capital expenditure planning, allocate overhead costs, and create a flexible revenue model that reflects how you do business. Forecaster delivers reporting that immediately shows the impact to your plans as the numbers change and provides easy consolidation with comparison to actual results.

Adaptive Planning

Adaptive Planning is the leading cloud-based revenue planning, budgeting and forecasting software for cash flow projection, sales planning & balance sheet forecasting. It combines a powerful financial modeling engine with an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface.  Adaptive Planning includes:

• Personnel Planning capabilities
• Revenue Planning & Sales Forecasting with unlimited dimensions for sales planning, multi-dimension cube sheets, lookup tables to automatically calculate revenue recognition, and the ability to integrate pipeline and actual sales data from CRM or other systems
• Capital Asset Planning enables you to configure sheets to show what’s important to your cash flow projection, drive new assets from other planned events, and use lookup tables to automatically calculate depreciation.
• Simplified Allocation Planning with an intuitive interface and rules instead of complex formulas
• Balance Sheet Forecasting & Cash Flow Forecasting with integrated P&L, balance sheet forecasting, and cash flow projections and what-if analyses to predict impact on cash flow forecast.
• Data Visualization & Dashboard functionality enables you to interact with intuitive charts and sophisticated analytics that are dynamically integrated with any data source.
• Dashboard & Scorecard Navigation that enables you to easily change time periods and filter by dimensions, customize views so that users see data that’s important to them, and navigate quickly across different levels of data.

To learn more or take advantage of any of these tools for budgeting in Microsoft Dynamics GP, contact us today.