It’s Budget Time: Is Excel Holding You Back?

Let’s set the scene.

It’s the start of another budget season. As the CFO, you and your team are working long hours to complete the budget process and set goals for the new financial year.

Sounds familiar? Sounds exhausting for most finance teams.

Yet it’s the same story every year.

As part of a large organisation, you’ve got to work with, manage and rely on multiple departments to deliver your FY budgets.

On top of that, you’re working in outdated Excel spreadsheets—full of dozens of tabs and broken formulas—to deliver a consolidated company budget that will allow your Board to make more informed business decisions.

Then, after months of hard work, you present your budget, only to be told that you need to increase revenue and reduce spending, sending you back to your Excel spreadsheets.

You’re not alone. This is very common in companies today.

If this sounds familiar, we understand your pain. The budgeting process is already overwhelming enough. Working on sub-standard systems costs you precious time, money, and resources every year.

You find yourself saying: “It’s the 2020ies! There’s got to be a better way to prepare and make changes to our budgeting data.”

Well, there is. Let’s explore it.

“The fact that large corporations still depend solely on Excel to make major financial decisions and compile budgets is keeping them hamstrung. Especially given how effective it is to streamline it all and save themselves hundreds of hours.”

- Serge Radisic

Minerva

?The automated driver-based budgeting and forecasting model

The common problem is that all of your data is siloed and insufficiently accessible to be able to put together your budget reports effectively.

However, using a combination of market-leading tools, you can quickly and easily collate your budget data and store it in one centralised and secure database. This provides you with a live, on-demand feed of your important business data.

The budgeting benefits for both you and your company

This streamlined setup allows you to build your company budget in a fraction of the time it takes using Excel alone, with the ability to easily make changes on the fly.

With a system that does all the heavy lifting for you, you no longer need to worry about mundane tasks such as importing, transforming, and reconciling data from multiple spreadsheets and sources.

The best part?

Even though you are transitioning to a better solution, you can still leverage the skills and capabilities that you’ve developed using platforms such as Excel.

That’s because you can still use spreadsheet-like interfaces to perform complex calculations, while automatically storing the outputs in a planning and reporting system. This also allows your entire team to easily contribute to and access actual and planning data in an instant.

This automated system is built around your objectives and processes, making it simple to integrate and enabling your organisation to thrive.

How does Minerva make this practical budgeting solution work for your business?

At Minerva, we’re experts in data consulting and data ecosystems, helping corporations like yours to collect, manage and automate large stacks of data. Through extensive consultation and a deep understanding of your business objectives, we put together customised solutions to help facilitate better data management.

Through partnerships with leading companies such as Jedox (Enterprise Performance Management), Snowflake (cloud-based Data Warehouse technology) and Power BI (Business Intelligence solutions), we can build you an automated driver-based budgeting and forecasting model to meet your needs.

How we collaborate with you

1.?????We examine and assess your current systems, including the outputs and objectives, to transform your business. We do this by combining disparate data sources into a single source of truth to improve the accuracy of your budgets, forecasts, and plans.

2.?????Rather than providing a simple plug and play solution, we tailor the most appropriate solution to fit your business needs, solve problems and importantly empower the user base to be more productive and value-adding.

3.?????Once we’ve built and implemented our robust and automated data foundation, you’ll have fast access to your data. You will also have transparency to allow for the simple alignment of your budget and actual results—helping to improve your data-driven decision making.

Let Minerva help you to improve your budgeting processes today

At Minerva, we collaborate with you and your team to find the best solution to replace your outdated data systems and provide you with the customised tools and training you need.

With key partnerships with market-leading software providers, Minerva makes digital transformation simple and more effective for your organisation, based on your unique needs.

If you’d like to learn more about how Minerva can help your business to save time, money and resources come budgeting time, contact us today on 1800 646 378 or email [email protected].

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