A Better Way To Budget: NetSuite Planning And Budgeting

Planning budgets for your business can surprisingly difficult, especially if you’re working with siloed data that isn’t always kept up-to-date with your operations during your planning and budgeting cycles.

And this makes planning your financial and operational forecasts, as well as communicating them to your key stakeholders, much more tedious than it needs to be.

But if you’re using Oracle NetSuite as the ERP software for your business, there’s a solution in the form of NetSuite Planning and Budget (NSPB), a tool that enables collaborative budget planning across departments within your entire business.

NSPB automates your business’s planning and budgeting processes, allowing your finance function easily produce the budgets and reports they need in a fraction of the time.

This allows them to spend more time on analysing it to produce actionable insights, which helps inform your planning and budgeting processes.

Let’s take a look at what NSPB brings to the table.

Seamless Integration With NetSuite

NetSuite Planning And Budgeting Data Synchronization; Source: Oracle NetSuite

If your finance function has been using spreadsheets to do the planning and budgeting for your business up until now, you might’ve noticed some of the limitations of this approach. One of them is the fact that your finance function must manually enter financial data into these spreadsheets.

This means the data only reflects the reality of your business’s financial situation at the time of data entry, which mean it’s already outdated and stale by the time it’s being used.

Worse still, this data could be inaccurate as a result of human error occurring during the data entry process. With stale and outdated data, how can your finance function hope to plan and budget for your business operations effectively?

With NSPB, that issue is resolved thanks to a seamless integration with the NetSuite ERP software.

This enables the tool to drill back to source transaction and account balance data stored in NetSuite’s database, which gives you a real-time view into your business’s financials and eliminates human error from the equation.

It then leverages on this real-time data to generate actionable insights using sophisticated modelling techniques, predictive analytics, multiple what-if scenarios, rolling forecasts, reporting and approval workflows.

This minimises the uncertainty introduced into your planning and budgeting processes by prevailing market conditions.

Collaborative Planning And Budgeting Across Departments

Enhance Collaboration With NetSuite Planning And Budgeting; Source: Oracle NetSuite

For your finance function to carrying out planning and budgeting effectively, they also need to collaborate and share financial data with other departments in your business.

However, relying on spreadsheets means that such collaborative efforts are not possible. They would not reflect reality on the ground due to relevant financial data being siloed within each department’s own systems.

NSPB resolves this issue by providing your key stakeholders with a single environment to connect to. It eliminates data silos by centralising all financial forecast data, and provides a single source of the truth for everyone to base their planning and budgeting on.

This resolves any version control issues that would usually crop up with planning and budgeting on spreadsheets, and allows your finance function to obtain meaningful input and engagement from the management teams in your other departments.

Generate Actionable Insights With Improved Visibility From Reports And Dashboards

Overview of NetSuite Planning And Budgeting Dashboard; Source: Oracle NetSuite

Visibility into your business’s financials is further enhanced with the NSPB interface, which provides end users with quick access to budget plans and reports through the web, on both their desktops and mobile devices.

Additionally, NSPB provides robust dashboard and report creation capabilities. This allows your finance function to create dashboards and reports that display planned, forecast and actual data in minutes.

With this, your finance function can count on having access to the most up-to-date financial data when doing planning and budgeting, and will reliably generate actionable insights with dashboards and reports that reflect reality in real-time.

Full Integration Of Microsoft Office Tools With Smart View For Office

Microsoft Office Integration Available; Source: Oracle NetSuite

NSPB also enables comprehensive integration with Microsoft Office, thanks to Smart View for Office.

With Smart View, your finance function can view, import, manipulate and share data through Office staples such as Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Your finance function can even use Excel as their environment for adding customer members on the fly, slicing and dicing data, and ad hoc modelling.

They can also create data grids which incorporate Excel formulas and formats, allowing your finance function to keep using Excel spreadsheets for planning and budgeting purposes, while still enjoying the benefits that NSPB brings to the table.

NSPB Offers A Better Way Of Business Planning, Forecasting And Budgeting

Relying on spreadsheets alone for your planning and budgeting might have been sufficient in the early days, but the limitations of this approach become more apparent the larger it grows.

After a certain point, the lack of real-time visibility into your business financials and the siloing of financial data begins to make a noticeable impact on your planning and budgeting processes.

Netsuite Planning and Budgeting provides a targeted solution for these issues, thanks to its integration with the NetSuite true cloud ERP software, and enabling of collaborative efforts between departments in your business.

This ensures your finance function will always have the most up-to-date financial data to generate actionable insights with its dashboard and report creation capabilities, and carry out their planning and budgeting in the familiar environment of Excel spreadsheets thanks to Smart View for Office.

To find out more about how NSPB can help your business plan and budget better than before, click on the image below to learn more about what it brings to the table for you.