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The Importance of Budgeting.
Does your organization produce budgets and track progress? What about revenue forecasts? In this article, we discuss why budgeting is important, and how you can produce budgets with surprisingly little effort in Sage MAS 90 and Sage MAS 200 ERP.
Why Budget And Forecast?
If you are only forecasting revenue but not budgeting expenses, you only have half the picture. By doing both, you can anticipate potential cash flow crunches and make plans to manage through them, such as applying for a business line of credit. In fact, budgets and forecasts can help you qualify for funding.—.demonstrating your company’s potential to investors and lenders.
Budgets and forecasts also are an excellent management tool. They can help your staff to understand goals and be accountable for staying in budget and reaching revenue milestones.
Budgets and forecasts also are essential if you are thinking of developing a new product line. By comparing expected revenues to costs you will quickly get a feel for the feasibility of your venture, as well as identify capital requirements.
Sage MAS 90 and 200 General Ledger Version 4.0 and above contains enhanced budgeting tools to help you create a basic budget. If you prefer to use Microsoft Excel for budgeting, F9 software allows you to read and write budget information between Excel spreadsheets and General Ledger module. If you need a tool with more flexibility and power, Sage Active Planner is available as a stand-alone budgeting tool. Here we provide an overview of each option.
Budgeting In General Ledger
With the current version of the Sage MAS 90 General Ledger module, you can save your historical budgets for reporting and comparison purposes, and set up budgets for future fiscal periods. An efficient grid-entry screen allows you to simultaneously edit budgets for multiple accounts.
Using Automatic Budget Copy, budgets can be generated for a new fiscal year based on prior year budget or actual expenses. You then can globally update by an amount or percentage and adjust individual accounts manually as needed. Budget Revision Entry allows you to perform what-if scenarios by making a number of changes without immediately updating the budget. You can print the Budget Revision Register to verify the accuracy of the information entered before updating.
Budgeting With F9 And Excel
If you and your staff like working in Excel, F9 software may be your choice for budgeting. F9, an Excel add-in, dynamically links Sage MAS 90 General Ledger data to Excel. Read Budget and Write Budget buttons pass budgets back and forth between the General Ledger and spreadsheet. Since F9 is hot-linked to the General Ledger you can be sure all numbers are up-to-date, consistent, and complete. If you want multiple users to develop budgets using Excel, but want to restrict General Ledger access to just a few key people, your accounting staff can export the budgets through F9 and forward them on to the appropriate staff. When complete and approved, accounting staff can use the F9 tool to load the revised budgets.
Sage Active Planner
If your organization is growing and many people are involved in the budgeting process, consider an enterprise-level budgeting software such as Sage Active Planner. Budget templates or Plan Sheets have a familiar spreadsheet look and feel and can be automatically distributed to budget owners in multiple departments and then consolidated at the end of the process. You can allocate budgets from bottom-up, top-down, or a combination of both. You also can consolidate several different budget plans. When budgets are complete, they can be entered into the General Ledger manually or through the built-in data import capabilities.
Do you need help getting started with budgeting at any level? Give us a call for assistance.
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