Make Planning & Budgeting a Breeze

Your accounting software is the foundation

‘To chart a course, first understand your present position’

Good cloud accounting software with the right finance data structure provides the foundation for robust planning & budgeting. Its your transactional finance system that lets you see your present position clearly. And its your actuals that form the basis for scenarios for the future.

What’s more, good cloud accounting software will often support forward thinking within the accounting software itself. For example, many good accounting software packages include the ability to see multiple versions of budgets within the accounting software, without the need for integration or separate dedicated planning & budgeting tools.

So given that, when do you need to go beyond your finance system and excel spreadsheets?

Hitting the excel ceiling

In short, if you are hitting the Excel ceiling. We’ve included in our previous blog ‘Your income can do more’ 8 indicators that you are hitting the Excel ceiling:

Manual data entry increases the risk of errors.
Formulas sitting in Excel on a laptop increase the risk of errors, leading to inaccurate forecasts.
Version control issues arise when multiple users work on spreadsheets, causing inconsistencies.
Excel lacks automation, making complex scenario planning time-consuming.
Excel struggles with integrating real-time data from multiple sources, limiting financial visibility.
Scalability is another challenge—growing organizations require dynamic solutions beyond static spreadsheets.
Security risks, such as unauthorized access and data loss, further weaken its reliability.
The resource cost of running Excel spreadsheet based planning is high.

If you are hitting the excel ceiling, its time to consider planning & budgeting tools.

So, if you need more than a finance system and separate excel spreadsheets, how do you make planning & budgeting a breeze?

Below are the five questions to ask yourself to make planning and budgeting more manageable.

Question 1: are you looking at a planning & budgeting tool that works with Excel?

If it feels like Excel limitations are having an impact, we recommend a ‘best of both worlds’ approach to a dedicated planning tool. In short, an FP&A solution that combines the familiar Excel user interface with a structured, back-end database.

This approach gives the structures, controls and framework of a back end database to address Excel limitations, whilst not losing the strengths of an Excel user experience.

Question 2: do you have the same finance data model in your finance system and your planning & budgeting tool?

The single most important factor in making Planning & Budgeting manageable is for your transactional finance system and your planning & budgeting tool to use the same finance data model.

It doesn’t matter what the planning & budgeting tool is: your data needs to be seamlessly aligned between your transactional finance system and your planning & budgeting tool.

This means having the same metadata structure in both your finance system and your planning & budgeting tool. The meta data in a finance system is the data structure: the chart of accounts, departments, cost centres, locations, projects. Not the actual numbers, but the way you want to look at the numbers.

Question 3: How much change is there to your finance data structure over time?

The third question to ask is how much change do you have to your data structure?

If you have a lot of change to your data structure (for example, new projects, change in cost centres, department hierarchy etc) in your transactional finance system, it becomes increasingly important that there is a seamless sync between your transactional finance system and your planning & budgeting tool.

It isn’t much fun perfectly, manually replicating every new department or project manually on your planning & budgeting spreadsheets or tool too.

Question 4: Do we need alternate hierarchy?

We often see use cases for ‘alternate hierarchy’ in a planning & budgeting tool.

This is where your planning and budgeting tool allows you to set up business rules to ‘spin’ the data into a different format. It can be incredibly useful for reporting to funders or third parties automatically, without complicating the transactional finance system data structure.

Question 5: How simple is your Budgeting process?

Lastly but by no means least, we’d suggest thinking about how smooth your budgeting process runs with your budget holders. How often can you reforecast?

A good budgeting and planning tool will contain mechanisms that aid the budgeting process, in particular around different versions of the budget and budget approval.