A corporate budgeting process involves three important tasks – Planning, Budgeting, and Financial Forecasting. Each of these tasks is aimed at aiding the business in truly understanding how all of the activities it is undertaking are contributing to its overall corporate strategy.
This is the reason why many businesses look into top budget planning tools. Businesses understand that improving their corporate budget planning requires investment in both technology and people.
What is worth noting is that in this rough and unpredictable economic climate, many organizations still struggle with their corporate financial planning despite their technological investments simply because many organizations continue to spend so much staff time, money, and effort into flawed and outdated budgeting processes. These flawed processes do not serve its purpose of helping the business understand how it is able or not able to meet its strategic goals.
The important question then is – just how can a business drastically improve its corporate budgeting process so that there may be better alignment thus, drastic improvement in the entire process?
There are 3 crucial ways to improve your corporate budgeting process. Below are what you should focus on:
- Establish clear leadership roles and responsibilities
Corporate budgeting process is one of those organizational activities that pierces through every part of the organization. It ties information, people, and processes together so that it can support holistic and better informed business decisions.
It is, therefore, important that your organization clearly establishes the right leadership and tone at the very top as this is important when doing planning, budgeting, and financial forecasting.
Corporate budgeting process must not be a process imposed by the finance department to all other departments like it did so in the past. It must be a process that is in touch with reality, fosters true alignment, and is accepted by everyone across the organization.
It must, above all, foster a sense of accountability for each person involved in the process. Lastly, clarity in the decision-making authority is important in order to simplify the very complex process that spans across geographies and departments.
- Bring Financial and Operational Planning together
As mentioned above, the main purpose of a corporate budgeting process is to support the overall organization strategy through its choice and prioritization of activities, allocation of resources and forecasting.
The issue for many businesses is that their corporate financial planning is most often disjointed that is is all too often seen as an imposition by the finance department without any real impact or purpose for the rest of the organization.
To drastically improve the corporate budgeting process, it then becomes imperative that financial and operational planning be brought closer together. You must try to truly integrate the corporate financial planning process so that disjointed or functional-based activities can be done away with.
If a business is to stay ahead of its competition, it must be agile and prompt in its decision-making.
- Choose a dynamic, adaptale, scalable tool
There is no doubt many want to invest in top budget planning tools. However, truly knowing what a good budgeting tool should be capable of is very difficult for many.
Many solutions in the market today are not agile, not adaptable or not modern enough that it is still easy for a business to end up with a flawed process and a barely useful new tool.
There is no shortage of budgeting solutions online and because of that the prices have also significantly gone down in comparison to what they were years ago.
Many tools do not anymore need end to end installation, you can now integrate types, sources, and structures across all functions, and it has more powerful analytical capabilities.
Performance Canvas by DSPanel is one of the popular tools that is a combination of a tool that is modern, cost-efficient, intuitive, and possesses leading edge capabilities.
Performance Canvas by DSPanel now boasts of a fully automated installation and provisioning as well as an intelligent and intuitive workflow that incorporates budgeting, planning, and forecasting best practices in the tool.
Over 2,500 companies currently enjoy the benefits of this solution both in the cloud and on-premise. To know more about it or to see a free online demo, visit www.performancecanvas.com or email [email protected].
DSPanel offers cutting edge technology platform for business analytics, planning, and visualization. DSPanel designs, builds, and operates with the end users in mind. Performance Canvas was created by DSPanel to answer the unarticulated needs of the market not addressed by previous available solutions. With Performance Canvas, information is transformed into valuable business insights for the business executives to utilize in their decision-making process. DSPanel currently has over 2500 organizations deploying their solutions.
