Many small and medium-sized businesses have sophisticated IT systems to
help run the business, but still rely almost exclusively on the simple
spreadsheet when building the budget. Even organisations with sales in
the tens or hundreds of millions of pounds have no specialist planning
software, but rely on a generic tool that that is two-dimensional in
nature, not integrated into other systems and frequently depends heavily
one person to maintain and update it. For such businesses, Compas can
significantly streamline the budgeting process, saving time and reducing
business risk.
For many of these businesses, a switch to a specialised budgeting tool
like Compas is not something that will happen overnight. However,
despite that, Compas can significantly improve the process, making it
faster, more enjoyable and more flexible, whilst providing outputs that
can directly be loaded into Excel to support the final budget
spreadsheet. However, benefits are not limited to the process of
building the initial budget. Compas supports the Finance function
throughout the year, making it almost trivially easy to create financial
reforecasts, comprising a blend of actuals and planned figures, and
providing a simple mechanism to report actuals against plan.
Listed below are 10 of the most significant ways in which Compas
supports and improves the budgeting process:
- Natural, intuitive planning: Compas supports your way of
planning. Plan the activities that matter to your business, at the
level of detail that works for you. Plan some products and customers
individually, and others as a group - or choose not to plan at that
level at all. Defining a business stream takes seconds, and Compas
performs all the hard work of calculating weekly sales and P&L.
- Instant aggregation: Whatever level you decide to plan at,
Compas supports all the detail you need and aggregates instantly on
the fly. This allows top-level reporting which can be drilled right
down to the bottom level if needed. Far more detail can be supported
than in a spreadsheet, making it easier to compare with actuals in
due course.
- Iterative approach: Compas supports the creation of multiple
draft budgets, before one is nominated as the final version and
saved permanently. Because each draft contains the full detail of
what it comprises, the drafts can be compared side by side to see
high-level differences and drilled down to see exactly what has
changed.
- Calculations are built into the system: Unlike in Excel, where
calculations must be copied from cell to cell, in Compas the
calculation is defined at the level of the object (e.g. shipping
cost might be defined as number of packages x average shipping cost
per package). This means that the calculation is guaranteed to be
correct wherever a number is used, and provides a single place to
update the calculation if it needs to change. In a spreadsheet,
formulae are easily overtyped, and changing a calculation means
updating it in every cell it is used, which is time-consuming and
error-prone.
- The business plan feeds the budget: Because the budget is
directly driven from the business plan, it is instantly possible to
see the underlying cause if sales targets are missed (or exceeded).
Contrast this with the situation where Finance build the financial
budget at arm's length from the rest of the business, making it
much harder to reconcile differences.
- Historical data where it's needed: The system used for
budgeting also contains several years of actuals data, providing all
the historical context and analytical tools necessary to build
accurate forecasts. This saves time and improves accuracy,
delivering tangible benefits which only increase over time.
- Supports a stand-alone budget workspace: Building the business
plan which feeds the budget can either be done in the 'live'
system (where it is subject to regular updates of actuals data) or
can be done in a frozen budget workspace that does not get regularly
updated and therefore provides a fixed environment in which to plan.
- Automatic loading of actuals data: In contrast to the
Excel-based approach, where actuals and budget are stored in
different systems, Compas receives direct feeds from company
systems, allowing seamless reporting of actuals against budget,
without any need to copy data from one environment to another. If
required, the actuals data can automatically update future
forecasts, or Compas can suggest updates that a human operator can
choose whether or not to accept.
- One-click budget restatements: Once the financial year starts,
Compas calculates a blended forecast, comprising actuals for the
year to date plus planned figures for the year to go. This means
that creating a budget restatement is a simple question of ensuring
that the business plan is up to date, and clicking a button to
capture the current plan and all its financial implications. As with
the original budget, the restatement will save all the inputs and
calculated figures, allowing comparison from the highest level down
to the bottom.
- Export to Excel: The data in the system can be exported to Excel
at summary or detail level, meaning that Compas can still support a
budgeting process that is ultimately stored in Excel, allowing
businesses to benefit from the detail, functionality and robustness
of Compas without having to change their process entirely.
If you would like to see this working for your business, please
contact us
now for a
no-obligation trial.
