FRx Poised to Permeate Many More General Ledgers Part Three: Market Impact continued
Nevertheless, since FRx already has direct integration built to over forty leading mid-market general ledgers (and now a scalable tool kit available to accommodate virtually all others), the idea behind that was for users to leverage the investment they have already made in their GL and to add on increased functionality as their needs become more sophisticated. To that end, another recent addition to the FRx stable, MBS for AnalyticsForecaster (formerly FRx Forecaster), a Web-based budgeting and planning application, depending upon the GL that is in use, can work with or without FRx. The product has been delivered as to cater for the growing needs of the companies to be able to produce "rolling budgets" that account for changing conditions instead of being static quarterly reports, and often after the fact. As an integral part of their corporate performance management strategy, more nimble companies are turning to iterative, continuous budgeting, and planning processes to better manage in today's volatile business climate.
In fact, planning and budgeting have become a means of translating strategy into a coherent set of objectives, as well as a basis for assessing achievement. As planning and budgeting should be a collaborative process (a forum on the future direction of the organization), there have been indications that even during unrelenting economic pressures, corporate managers are still seeing value in providing desktop portal views of key business process analytics to an increasing number of corporate workers. As a result, many financial executives have been marking active financial planning tools as a top investment. On the other hand, the majority of those annual plans are still completed in Excel spreadsheets, which wreaks havoc for business analysts and IT as they try to figure out complicated links and how to import and export data to and from the spreadsheets.
Contrary to that, Forecaster's collaborative capabilities should save time and help improve the quality of the final budget, making it more realistic and accurate. Users can collaborate using features such as automatic e-mail notification of upcoming deadlines and a centralized bulletin board where goals, objectives, business tactics, and instructions are posted for enterprise-wide access. Through the use of memos, notes and attachments, managers can understand the rationale behind important numbers and assumptions made by other departmental managers, reducing, or eliminating time spent in meetings.
Furthermore, Forecaster lets department managers interact with each other to insure their budgets complement each other's. For example, if a department budgets for a new program that impacts other departments, all budgets can reflect the impact of the new program. With the roll ups feature, reorganizing the company's chart of accounts is facilitated, since roll ups are parent-child relationships that control how the posting data summarizes. Users can create rollups for accounts, cost centers, and for many other accounting entities they choose to use in their application by defining roll ups using Forecaster' intuitive drag-and-drop interface, then run a simple restate function to consolidate the data.
Forecaster allows managers to input their own numbers, eliminating the duplicate entry or potential for errors. Managers can readily make changes to their cost centers by entering data directly to accounts or by using copy/grow functions, calculated accounts, or spread-back methods. In addition to improving the accuracy of the numbers, Forecaster should improve the quality of the numbers because totals and consolidated numbers are available for reporting as soon as they are input. If there are any problems or any adjustments required, they can be performed immediately by those who understand the numbers. Furthermore, by simply entering a dollar or percentage change, the budget administrator can make an adjustment that will ripple through the entire plan. As a result, budgets should be completed more quickly, allowing for more iterations and "what if" analyses as necessary.
Forecaster streamlines many of the tasks that comprise the budgeting process, including individual creation of budgets, changing the budget model, budget consolidations, and reporting and collaborating with interrelated departments to improve the chances of achieving set goals. This streamlining of tasks gives managers more time to construct a thoughtful budget that is based on valid data and assumptions (e.g., headcounts, project schedules, costs, etc. can be changed and simulated to reflect different economic assumptions) and thus more predictive of the future. Accessing up-to-date and historical information from the general ledger and existing financial reports, users can budget and plan with greater precision.
Through the use of views (the reporting mechanism in Forecaster) users are able to customize and analyze information that is important to their organization. Forecaster consists of the following modules that allow users to perform customized analysis:
* Expense budgeting, allows customers to define templates specific to cost centers, and thereby enables managers to focus on the information that is important to them.
* Human resource, allows a company to better understand the effect of salary adjustments, bonuses, overtime, and benefits, given employees often account for the highest part of the expense in a company's budget.
* Capital expense, lets the company standardize the accounting of capital expenditures by cost centers;
* Revenue planning, allows customized accounts and formulas to be used to calculate revenues and cost of sales, whereby formulas can be customized to meet organizational needs such as production, staffing, raw materials, and outside revenue planning.
Nevertheless, since FRx already has direct integration built to over forty leading mid-market general ledgers (and now a scalable tool kit available to accommodate virtually all others), the idea behind that was for users to leverage the investment they have already made in their GL and to add on increased functionality as their needs become more sophisticated. To that end, another recent addition to the FRx stable, MBS for AnalyticsForecaster (formerly FRx Forecaster), a Web-based budgeting and planning application, depending upon the GL that is in use, can work with or without FRx. The product has been delivered as to cater for the growing needs of the companies to be able to produce "rolling budgets" that account for changing conditions instead of being static quarterly reports, and often after the fact. As an integral part of their corporate performance management strategy, more nimble companies are turning to iterative, continuous budgeting, and planning processes to better manage in today's volatile business climate.
In fact, planning and budgeting have become a means of translating strategy into a coherent set of objectives, as well as a basis for assessing achievement. As planning and budgeting should be a collaborative process (a forum on the future direction of the organization), there have been indications that even during unrelenting economic pressures, corporate managers are still seeing value in providing desktop portal views of key business process analytics to an increasing number of corporate workers. As a result, many financial executives have been marking active financial planning tools as a top investment. On the other hand, the majority of those annual plans are still completed in Excel spreadsheets, which wreaks havoc for business analysts and IT as they try to figure out complicated links and how to import and export data to and from the spreadsheets.
Contrary to that, Forecaster's collaborative capabilities should save time and help improve the quality of the final budget, making it more realistic and accurate. Users can collaborate using features such as automatic e-mail notification of upcoming deadlines and a centralized bulletin board where goals, objectives, business tactics, and instructions are posted for enterprise-wide access. Through the use of memos, notes and attachments, managers can understand the rationale behind important numbers and assumptions made by other departmental managers, reducing, or eliminating time spent in meetings.
Furthermore, Forecaster lets department managers interact with each other to insure their budgets complement each other's. For example, if a department budgets for a new program that impacts other departments, all budgets can reflect the impact of the new program. With the roll ups feature, reorganizing the company's chart of accounts is facilitated, since roll ups are parent-child relationships that control how the posting data summarizes. Users can create rollups for accounts, cost centers, and for many other accounting entities they choose to use in their application by defining roll ups using Forecaster' intuitive drag-and-drop interface, then run a simple restate function to consolidate the data.
Forecaster allows managers to input their own numbers, eliminating the duplicate entry or potential for errors. Managers can readily make changes to their cost centers by entering data directly to accounts or by using copy/grow functions, calculated accounts, or spread-back methods. In addition to improving the accuracy of the numbers, Forecaster should improve the quality of the numbers because totals and consolidated numbers are available for reporting as soon as they are input. If there are any problems or any adjustments required, they can be performed immediately by those who understand the numbers. Furthermore, by simply entering a dollar or percentage change, the budget administrator can make an adjustment that will ripple through the entire plan. As a result, budgets should be completed more quickly, allowing for more iterations and "what if" analyses as necessary.
Forecaster streamlines many of the tasks that comprise the budgeting process, including individual creation of budgets, changing the budget model, budget consolidations, and reporting and collaborating with interrelated departments to improve the chances of achieving set goals. This streamlining of tasks gives managers more time to construct a thoughtful budget that is based on valid data and assumptions (e.g., headcounts, project schedules, costs, etc. can be changed and simulated to reflect different economic assumptions) and thus more predictive of the future. Accessing up-to-date and historical information from the general ledger and existing financial reports, users can budget and plan with greater precision.
Through the use of views (the reporting mechanism in Forecaster) users are able to customize and analyze information that is important to their organization. Forecaster consists of the following modules that allow users to perform customized analysis:
* Expense budgeting, allows customers to define templates specific to cost centers, and thereby enables managers to focus on the information that is important to them.
* Human resource, allows a company to better understand the effect of salary adjustments, bonuses, overtime, and benefits, given employees often account for the highest part of the expense in a company's budget.
* Capital expense, lets the company standardize the accounting of capital expenditures by cost centers;
* Revenue planning, allows customized accounts and formulas to be used to calculate revenues and cost of sales, whereby formulas can be customized to meet organizational needs such as production, staffing, raw materials, and outside revenue planning.
