8March 2016Budgeting and Forecasting SolutionsBy Kevin Held, CFO, TradingScreenIused to say that a budget was only worth the paper it was written on. Fifteen years ago, the budget was created in a spreadsheet and was a static document. It was a point in time `guess'of what was going to happen the next year. As CFO, you would start creating the budget in the third quarter as you saw how the current year was shaping up and present a final version to the Board of Directors in December or January. Your job was then to report on how the company performed against those numbers. So much for flexibility.Oh how the process has changed! We now have so many choices that we need to have debates over using in-house versus cloud based systems and whether its correct to do rolling forecasts. The real question is what do you need as the owner of the system and what is the rest of the organization going to expect from it?These days, the available systems are far more advanced than the combination of Great Plains and FRX report writer and the budgeting and forecasting functionality that was used way back when. Information and data is flowing at such a greater rate of speed than in the past and being nimble in today's world is a must.Identifying the needs of the organization is a key component of picking and implementing any system. Don't always assume you know what your end users want. Sit down with them to learn what their needs are. Talk to them about things such as how tech savvy they are or how they like to see reporting; do they prefer dashboards, do they want reports emailed or do they want to pull down their own Kevin HeldIn My OpinionDe-mystifying
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