Start your yearly financial planning and forecasting the right way with Sage Intacct Planning

There are a number of common challenges that finance leaders face with traditional budgeting methods, especially when planning for the calendar or financial year. Processes are often time-consuming, requiring a lot of manual admin. Tasks can take much longer with resources put under strain and with teams stretched, room for human error increases – it’s a vicious cycle. 

In this piece, we’ll be looking at some of these challenges in a bit more detail. We’ll also explore how you can drastically reduce time spent budgeting, while increasing accuracy and driving efficiency through methods using Sage Intacct Planning as a tool to support navigating these challenges.   

The challenges to traditional financial budgeting

Budgeting is such a critical process for any business, but traditional methods come with quite a few roadblocks for finance teams to navigate. These hold back efficiency, strategic alignment and impact the accuracy of reporting.  

For anyone who has been involved in budgeting for a particular timeframe, you may have felt the frustration of the following challenges.  

Dependence on multiple spreadsheets and systems

Having crucial financial data spread across many disparate spreadsheets and systems heaps time on any finance team.  

Collating multiple spreadsheets means human error can occur, with mistyped numbers or incorrect data links. Minor errors such as incorrectly written formulas can cascade into significant issues in forecasting figures. All of this contributes to further slowing down any planning or budgeting.  

Breakdown in collaboration between departments 

With disparate systems comes a breakdown in information sharing across teams and the business. Gaining input from various departments is time consuming, requiring lengthy email chains and shared spreadsheets. It can be difficult to track down information required, with key information sometimes missing.  

This makes financial planning even more challenging and can impact wider strategic alignment across the business.  

Lack of real-time insights

With the manual sourcing of information for reporting, not hosted in a real-time purpose-built system, reporting figures are quickly out of date. This makes planning for the coming quarter and year even more difficult, with inaccurate forecasting built on inaccurate data.  

Reports and plans are often required to be revisited, increasing the complexity of budgeting and contributing to bottlenecks to any growth plans being implemented. 

Difficulty in scaling

When finance teams look at the year ahead, planning for growth is often budgeted for. What’s more, when an organisation grows into the mid-market, it’ll be required to manage larger datasets, new and expanding business units with new staff.  

With expansion, the complexity of budgeting and the overall finance function only increases, making things even harder for finance teams to manage. Plans to scale can be stalled as a result, with other tasks also being impacted as balancing resources becomes an uphill battle. 

How can organisations and their finance teams navigate these challenges?

While these challenges may seem daunting, especially to the finance teams of smaller organisations that are looking to grow, there are a few steps that can be taken to navigate these challenges. We’d encourage organisations, their finance leaders and their teams to consider the following: 

Collaborative budgeting

To start, organisations should focus on collaborative budgeting. A shared attitude to this type of activity can help to avoid any breakdown in communications between departments. Having all departments working in sync will make reporting easier for finance, but also other business units, as vital data for all reporting takes precedent and becomes more accessible.  

Encourage data-driven decision-making

In a similar light, creating a culture around data–driven solutions will also support collaborative budgeting, making planning easier for finance teams. With a shared understanding of the value of making key business decisions based on data, teams across the business are more likely to work together, sharing a common goal that is visible, achievable and based on real evidence.  

Deploy modern budgeting and planning software

To best achieve these steps for navigating common challenges to budgeting and financial planning, we recommend that you embrace modern budgeting and planning software. Investing in systems like Sage Intacct Planning will help you to achieve a common culture focused on data–driven decision making, better collaboration across departments and increased precision and effectiveness in the budgeting process for the finance team.  

What is Sage Intacct Planning? 

Sage Intacct Planning is a best-in-class financial planning software that supports organisations in moving beyond spreadsheets, streamlining your planning and providing in-depth insights. 

With business data consolidated within a single platform, hosted on the cloud, finance teams will have improved visibility and insight into financial data. Finance teams will benefit greatly through a variety of features, making planning and budgeting much easier. 

How Sage Intacct Planning can make your life easier

Reduced time spent on budgeting

Through automated reporting and forecasting features, workflows are put together faster and more accurately. In addition, Sage Intacct Planning brings you built-in, pre-designed templates that help you speed up the setup process to ensure consistency across all departments. Sage claims that deploying Sage Intacct Planning can help you to reduce the time spent budgeting by up to 50%. 

Improved data accuracy and integrity

Driven by data, organisations can benefit from accurate forecasting. Manual data entry is eliminated, as crucial financial information is pulled from integrated systems across the business, which means that budgets are built on the up-to-date picture. Such data integrity is also achieved through dynamic updates, where real-time changes to figures are immediately reflected in financial planning, removing any delays. 

Enhanced collaboration

On one centralised cloud-based platform, all business units can work together, reducing the time spent on chasing other stakeholders for vital information required for reports. With this infrastructure in place, you can consolidate Excel spreadsheets, allowing the finance team to benefit from a more efficient way of building reports. 

Scenario planning and forecasting

Sage Intacct Planning is also great for scenario planning. Finance leaders can generate detailed reports and visual dashboards in just a few clicks, viewing data for now or the future in a clear and meaningful way. Complete scenarios can be budgeted for, where evaluating uncertainties, risks and opportunities of multiple future states can be considered. 

Freed–up resource

With Sage Intacct Planning, stakeholders across multiple business functions save so much time that would previously be spent chasing other stakeholders and team members, tracking down old reports in a variety of systems and spreadsheets.  

With everything in one place, automating and impacting budgeting and planning figures, time is given back to teams to focus on the tasks where they can add the greatest value. 

Learn more about Sage Intacct Planning with Thinc

Budgeting and planning for the year is achieved with much greater accuracy through modernising financial processes, saving vast amounts of time for finance leaders and their teams. At the heart of this comes the implementation of bespoke financial planning software.  

This is because of its ability to support budgeting and planning through cross-departmental collaboration, data-driven decision making and efficiencies from having real-time data in one bespoke system.  

Based in the cloud, finance teams can benefit from creating insightful budgets based on accurate data, saying goodbye to multiple systems and spreadsheets and welcoming more informed financial decisions at the fraction of the time it used to take to create budgets. 

How you can get started with Sage Intacct Planning

Should you wish to find out more about Sage Intacct Planning, or how you can draw upon our support to continue to streamline your finance processes, get in touch with Thinc today.