Solutions

Budgeting & Planning

Nowhere within an enterprise are spreadsheets more widely used as the tool of choice than in financial budgeting and planning.

In fact, according to CFO.com, over 73% of midsize companies still use spreadsheets for financial planning and budgeting. While some larger companies have adopted enterprise-wide point solutions, spreadsheets are still the main tool for collecting planning and budget inputs and distributing reports for these systems. Microsoft ® Excel is still the most popular tool, however it's not enterprise quality and does not promote collaboration—either internally or across business partners.

The Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP) is built using what you already use today—spreadsheets. With BCP, you can easily migrate your existing manual spreadsheet-based process into an enterprise quality, collaborative system. Unlike point solutions which often make you change your budgeting and planning process to fit a rigid software architecture, only BCP lets your company fully leverage your existing process and business logic while retaining the renowned flexibility of Excel.

Financial Budgeting and Planning Challenges

  • Exchanging budgeting and planning information has traditionally been done by emailing spreadsheets between process participants. While the flexibility of spreadsheets make modeling business logic parameters easy, sharing this logic and collaborating over plan iterations is difficult at best
  • Consolidating input from all planning participants at different levels in order to develop a rolled up view of the plan is time consuming and results in a prolonged planning process. This means you can have only a minimal number of planning iterations to develop and agree upon a final plan
  • The traditional manual method of cutting and pasting sections of the plan for different participants and emailing them out often produces many errors and omissions
  • Understanding and analyzing changes between planning cycles and between planning periods is very difficult with typical spreadsheet reports
  • Since financial planning and budgeting information is extremely sensitive, it’s important for companies to have reliable data throughout the planning process. Emailing spreadsheets around with no security, access control, or audit trail can potentially compromise and expose planning information

The Boardwalktech Solution: BCP-Driven financial budgeting and planning

The Boardwalk Collaboration Platform solution for financial budgeting and planning lets you develop an enterprise quality “single version of the truth” for all your spreadsheet-based planning data. At the same time, BCP lets you retain the flexibility and power of Excel’s business modeling environment on the desktop which is essential to a successful planning process.

  • Fully leverage and continue to use your existing Excel-based budgeting and planning worksheets
  • Automatically distribute, consolidate, and report planning information across multiple levels within the organization directly from within Excel
  • Take planning data offline and work in isolation, then automatically synchronize your changes with other participants in the planning process
  • A single, secure version of your data provides a complete cell-level audit trail, change history, and comprehensive access control for your sensitive planning data
  • Within Excel, see changes at the cell-level as you collaborate with other participants. All changes are automatically versioned by BCP which means you can compare changes between versions directly in Excel
  • Seamlessly share planning data changes between your system of record and your spreadsheet-driven planning process

Benefits of Using BCP for Financial Budgeting and Planning

  • Since BCP is built upon and uses the familiar Excel environment, adoption is rapid, training is minimal, and the investment in capturing your existing planning process is preserved
  • Automating the collaboration and consolidation process means budgeting planning cycle times are reduced freeing up employees to focus on activities which improve operational results
  • Reach more participants in the planning process since users can work in isolation using Excel on the desktop and submit their changes when ready to commit
  • Insure reliable data throughout your planning process by leveraging BCP’s enterprise quality, access-controlled single version of the truth for all planning data
  • Eliminate the confusion of trying to gain visibility into and understand what’s changed in your spreadsheet-based planning data across multiple versions using BCP’ unique cell-level change management and audit trail
  • Planning reports are updated in real-time at the cell-level versus having to email new versions as changes are made