Speeding up budget planning

Templates. When you budget in Office Excel, each department usually has its own template. If you add a company-wide budget line or account, then you have to add it to every single spreadsheet. Microsoft Forecaster allows you to create templates for each department or cost center. When there's a change, all you have to modify is the template, not the individual spreadsheets applied across multiple cost centers. And the same concept applies to formulas and calculations. If you have a formula in a template that needs to be recalculated, you only have to change it in one place.

Deadline control. One sure productivity killer for the accounting department: having to constantly prod contributors to submit budget data. Draconian though it may sound, Microsoft Forecaster allows the accounting department to set deadlines for budget updates and then lock out people who don't meet the deadline. This gives your financial department more control over inputand lets them monitor the process more efficiently.

Standard calculations. One of the most tedious activities in accounting is the application of standard calculations, but Microsoft Forecaster speeds this up in a variety of ways. For instance, Office Excel has no specific payroll tax function—someone has to create the formula. Microsoft Forecaster, on the other hand, provides the payroll tax function within the software, The same goes for foreign currency translation—once you input an exchange rate, all the templates access that same rate. Finally, if you need to allocate an entire department's budget across a group of other departments, such as administration, facilities or IT, Microsoft Forecaster can automatically do that based on the data entered into its database.

Access control. Like most any application, Microsoft Forecaster incorporates functionality-governing access for specific users. Even this relates to productivity, because to offer access to specific reports, all you have to do is send out a URL for an internal Web address. With the right log in credentials, users can access the report directly. The same goes for budgeting—you can send users directly to where they need to input information. This makes it much easier for the end usersand they love it because the budget administrator has done all the work. If you make access that simple, it really encourages end users to get the work done.

Version control. Once you approve your budget, it's cast in stone—you don't want anyone altering the data. But for those people who need to immediately copy that approved budget and start doing forecasts based on other input, Microsoft Forecaster makes it easy. It also offers version control, so you can easily identify what's current and what's a forecast. Letting people adjust the numbers leads to better information, which leads to better business decisions.