Let's face it - most companies use Microsoft Excel to either fully prepare their budgets and forecasts, or at least to aid in some portion of this process.
There are numerous reasons for this, including the following:
- Excel is already installed
- Business users already know how to use Excel
- Business users like (or should I say love) Excel
- The organizations' ERP system allows one to import a budget from Excel
But when an organization's level of sophistication grows, using Excel can become an inefficient and complex tool to prepare budgets and forecasts for business users. But, how can organizations identify this tipping point? The following questions may assist you:
- Business users are reluctant to re-forecast due to complexity and amount of effort required
- Business users are expected to learn and leverage Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in Excel to keep up with organizational complexity or business users begin to lose control of their financial and operational models as internal IT or external consultants develop and maintain complex VBA code
- Business users like (or should I say love) for Excel begins to diminish as they spend more and more time populating data and fixing errors in the spreadsheets
- Other planning and performance management areas, including financial and operational reporting systems bundled with the organization's ERP system no longer meet the growing complexity of organizational requirements
What are your thoughts on this topic?
Good news for Forecaster 7 users who have been patiently waiting for the re-release of Forecaster 7 SP4 to rectify a number of nasty issues - Service Pack 5 is on its way!
At present, I do not have the expected release date, but it is good news nonetheless!
For those who don't want to wait, you can always look at alternate budgeting & reporting solutions, such as, Prophix CPM which allows you to link operational and financial budgets to drive real value from the planning and performance management process.
For those who are not in a rush, why not wait until budgeting can be performed in Management Reporter?
Jet Express is the latest in the full selection of friendly, easy to use reporting and analytics tools available from Jet Reports. It is a free Excel based reporting tool that will be made available for Dynamics GP at Convergence 2013 in mid-March 2013.
Let the count-down begin!
I couldn't resist another winter themed post on Business Intelligence.
While those of us who are less technically inclined may enjoy the picture below, those who design and develop data marts and data warehouses are very familiar with both the snowflake and star schema.
One popular truth regarding snowflakes is that no two snowflakes are identical. When it comes to Business Intelligence, no two organization's needs are identical either.
Enjoy the winter beauty of stars and snowflakes this season - and let us take care of data structure underpinning your Business Intelligence solution. You'll be happy you did!
If you have kids, you'll agree that one of the top things on their minds this season is what they want for Christmas.
But what about the retailers and organizations who are hoping to make the best of this Christmas season? How can they best predict what products to stock up on?
I know from first-hand experience, that my favourite winter tire brand seems to always be 'sold-out' by mid-December - what if they could better predict demand and optimize their production and supply chain to fulfill more requests?
From a BI perspective, the answer lies in the predictive power of data mining. One real world predictive analytics and data mining solution called Sentinel Mining is based on the Ph. D. thesis by TARGIT CTO Dr. Morten Middelfart. Check it out!
This post is nothing but my own thoughts, as Microsoft unfortunately does not have an update on when Management Reporter will incorporate budgeting and forecasting functionality.
That being said, I wonder if the following two recent developments in MR 2012 RU3 might hint that budgeting is just around the corner:
- Extension of the data mart for Dynamics GP
- MR Web Report Viewer
What could these developments hint at you ask?
Well, the data mart would be a good backbone for housing the budget and forecast version data in a uniform way across all Dynamics ERPs. Since MR will eventually be the full Dynamcis ERP CPM solution, the budgets will not necessarily need to be brought back into the respective Dynamics ERP, unless other aspects of the ERP require it (i.e. encumbrance management).
To a lesser degree, a web-based interface simplifies access to Management Reporter and could be leveraged for future remote budget entry similar, but much better than, Forecaster's webclient.
Click here for more or my ramblings about budgeting in Management Reporter.
It has been over two years now since Management Reporter 2 was released and available for Microsoft Dynamics GP - its hard to believe! Click here to see my first blog post on the subject.
Microsoft's original road map showed budgeting and forecasting built into Management Reporter in two stages:
- Simple budgeting in 2012
- Complex budgeting in 2014
Obviously a roadmap is highly subject to change and at this point in the game, Microsoft is still in the planning stages. While this may cause uncertainty for users who are holding out for this functionality to be added to MR, lets hope that our wait is worth it in as far as the future functionality delivered in MR.
According to my Linked In poll here, the majority of MR users want to see budgeting as the next feature, followed up by integration with sub-ledgers rather than just the GL.
Since all the Dynamics ERP solutions have basic budgeting features, perhaps Microsoft's strategy has changed to hold-off and just deliver features that surpass Microsoft Forecaster rather than introduce basic budgeting and forecasting.
Either way, if you or your organization is looking for a unified CPM solution that handles all budgeting, forecasting, reporting and analysis in one place today, look no further than Prophix CPM. Click here for more information on its advanced capabilities. Your budget contributors, financial analysts and their spouses or significant others will thank you!
