As Your Company "Grows Up"

As your company “grows up”, so will your need for improved budgeting and financial planning tools. The more departments, products, services, and people you have, the more complicated it is to pull together a budget.

At Wolfedale Electric, we spend a great deal of time planning for the future. We make strategic and operations plans, and turn them into the financial budget that is necessary to track results against. Typically I would develop our annual budget in Excel. This was becoming increasingly difficult as the Excel model grew with the complexity of our business. It became hard to maintain the integrity of all the formulas, links, and pages. One mistake, omission, or accidental deletion would cause the account level details to not roll up properly. Finding the problem was often like finding a needle in a haystack.
Another shortcoming was that our budget was an annual budget - twelve months long. It became progressively near sighted as each month of the fiscal year went by. That makes little sense when your business planning is continuous and should always be looking out at least a year.

Lastly, our budget was only about sales, margin, expenses, and net income. What about assets, liabilities, and equity? There are some important things in there. Like cash!

I’m excited to have found a solution. It’s Budget Maestro from Centage Corporation. This slick software has some great features. It has a five year planning horizon. It’s integrated so the budget details are in the budget itself, not on separate working papers. It’s inherently accurate with no formulas to worry about. It uses a double entry (debit and credit) basis to automatically budget the balance sheet. Enter a budget expense item and the software makes the correct balance sheet entry! It has features for personnel expenses, assets and sales. You can budget increases on just about any basis. Want widget sales to increase 2 % a quarter over the next three years? Done! “What- if” scenarios are built in. Need a Plan B because your business situation is changing? No sweat!

Like most new business applications, it came with a considerable learning curve. I have put a lot of hours into understanding how it works and recently developing my first budget in it. I’m happy I can see the top of the curve now and its actually becoming easy. And it still has so many untapped capabilities.

If your company has outgrown doing its budget on a table napkin, spreadsheet, or whatever, I encourage you to look for a solution, and you might want to look at this one. At first sight it’s a bit pricey at about $4,000. But you can expect this to pay off in time savings, and better business planning - which means better business results. So if you can find it in your budget, I think it’s worth it!
Here’s a link to it if you’re interested: http://centage.com/products-budget-maestro-overview.htm

Mark Benson
Controller
Dial One Wolfedale Electric

Giving You the Power.