What’s Influencing Your Decisions? Budgeting Tools for Better Planning

Tuesday, December 1, 2009 by Julie Stankey

Social Media expert, Dan Schwabel, recently tweeted, “Influence = someone making a decision based on what you say.”  That got me thinking about what influences the decisions that we are making during the business planning and budgeting cycles that so many of us are engrossed in this time of year.  When you sit down to do your planning and budgeting, are you listening to your employees, your CPA, your favorite newscaster, or your data? 

In a year of economic uncertainty, it is especially difficult to trust your numbers and use them as a basis to plan for future success.  That is why the same ERP solution that you use to extract your financial data provides tools to help you analyze that data and leverage it to plan and set your budgets.  Each ERP solution has slightly different tools for budgeting, but all will influence the decisions you make and confidence with which you make them. 

Sage Active Planner

If you are a Sage MAS 90, 200 or 500 user, you can take advantage of Sage Active Planner to improve the flow of key information such as business drivers and transaction data, through templates, automatic distribution and consolidation of the budget, central control over budget revisions, real-time seamless integration of data sources, and built-in security mechanisms.   To learn more and see Sage Active Planner in action, attend this Sage software webinar on December 8th at 1:00 PM:  Control Your Budget – Don’t Let it Control You

Microsoft Forecaster

Microsoft Dynamics ERP users (those that use Microsoft Dynamics GP, Great Plains, Solomon, or Microsoft Dynamics SL for example) can take advantage of can build budgets that incorporate market conditions and specific business objectives. When the business environment changes, Microsoft Forecaster can be used to adjust forecasts and budgets so that managers can respond effectively.  Additionally, it allows you to quickly view current budget-to-actual comparisons to help you understand the effect of changing numbers on your plans.  Read how Socius’ client Bellefaire JCB/Wingspan Care Group is using Forecaster with Microsoft Dynamics GP to create budgets that stear them toward their goals while reducing administrative costs by 5%. 

BIO for Microsoft Dynamics SL

While BIO provides a wealth of business intelligence tools to Microsoft Dynamics SL users, for the purpose of this post, we’ll focus on it’s budgeting capabilities.  Not only can the business insights revealed by BIO help guide your decision making, but BIO also contains the ability to track your business performance and measure it against a goal or budget, so that you can adjust as you go and grow.  Because it is specialized for Microsoft SL, BIO not only helps with organizational budgeting, but also creating project budgets.  Lastly, BIO data is presented in role-based scorecards so everyone in your organization sees the data most relevant to them.  Learn more about BIO for Microsoft Dynamics SL.