For any company, maintaining a strong budget is one of the most important aspects in running a business. A business must make sure it has enough capital to pay the bills at the same time have money to invest in new things whether it be a product or a service. Nonetheless, investments must be made to continuously improve the way they do business.
More than 500 million finance users today still use Microsoft Excel for budgeting. This is understandably so because Microsoft Excel provides budget-building tools that enable these users to do their job fairly easily.
Many mid-sized to large companies require the ability to do financial forecasting so they can lay out their plans for the coming months or years more accurately. One of the good things about Excel is that it allows regression analysis solution so that forecasting the sales of a particular product can be possible. Now this feature is important because companies must be able to see year over year trends to have a clearer idea of what is to come. Projecting sales this way allows a company to manage their budget more objectively.
Excel also allows its users to do spreadsheets Analyst Budgeting by using a data warehouse to hold the budgets and data.
Although Excel is a good tool to use for budgeting and forecasting, it is not without problems. It cannot do all of the business projections a company may think or want. Many Excel users recognize that relying on Excel spreadsheets alone to keep track of financial data is not practical in the long run.
Spreadsheets can be time-consuming to use, complex, and difficult to share among departments. Poor data integrity can become a critical issue. The breakdowns in Excel if left unnoticed can cost a lot of damage on a company´s budget plan. For many companies, relying on a tool that has a potential to breakdown or have poor data integrity just isn´t smart.
This being said, there is an easier fix to it. A good way to resolve this is to shift to an Excel-based Business Intelligence or CPM system. A system that uses the familiar interface of Excel but does not contain raw data. It instead links cells in worksheets to multidimensional data that is stored either locally or on a server.
A solution like this that can integrate with Excel gives companies the ability to handle huge quantities of data without fear of losing its integrity. They can import data from several years or decades allowing them to have a clearer picture of the trends and forecast accordingly.
For a user that has started in Excel, the best way is to stay with what you know but fix the underlying issues. No matter how many tools out there claim to do what Excel can do, Excel remains to be the most relied upon tool by finance experts. If you can stay with Excel but remove its limitations, it will quite simply be the best of both worlds.
If you are experiencing these problems firsthand, Performance Canvas is today’s most modern financial tool that leverages Excel´s abilities. To learn more about Performance Canvas or if you want to see what it can do for your business, email us at info@dspanel.com.
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.
