♦ Your annual Budgeting and monthly Forecasting processes can either be a piece of cake or a complete pain in the gut. It can take hours to do or it can take days to weeks to do. How you build it determines which of the two results you get. We do not expect you to know how to build a simple to use point-n-click budgeting/forecasting application as you are not the Microsoft Excel programming experts, we are and that is why you are reading this. You can create your own poorly built application or you can hire us to make the one you really want and the one that your organization needs.
Our fully integrated and automated forecasting and budgeting solutions are push-button simple. Point-n-click graphical-user-interface, watch the computer run, done. Simple.
Your Budgeting and Forecasting Processes can be a piece of cake or a pain, you decide.
♦ As the old adage goes, “failing to plan is planning to fail.” Anyone who’s helped run a business knows how important it is to prepare for the future. This includes creating advertisements, devising strategies, and many other activities, but perhaps the most important among them all is accounting for your financial future. After all, without the proper resources, even the most ambitious, outstanding enterprise couldn’t get much done.
♦ Planning for your financial future is also often one of the most difficult, stress-inducing tasks. Are you completely sure that you’ll have sufficient sales to pay your employees? Exactly how much money will you need to stock that warehouse? What if your office rent increases? These questions might swirl around your head, seeming so overwhelming that you just decide to focus on something else, instead. However, it is, of course, vital that you do take charge of organizing your company’s accounts for future months.
♦ That may seem difficult to accomplish without a corporate crystal ball, but it can actually be quite simple, if you make appropriate arrangements and know the correct techniques. At Get Excel Help, we often assist companies with financial quandaries. One of the most powerful applications of Excel is in streamlining and enhancing your ability to budget for your venture and forecast its future. Read on to learn more about how Excel budgeting and forecasting could ease your concerns and bolster your business.
Budgeting and forecasting utilize your business’s accounting data to lay out exactly what resources you need to function and predict what will happen in the coming weeks, months, or even years. These approaches are approximates – no one can definitively predict your monetary dynamics down to the cent – but vital nonetheless. Budgeting and forecasting are, essentially, representations of information – they are as useful as they are utilized. An expertly crafted budget and optimally accurate forecast won’t do much good if your company doesn’t take the proper corresponding actions. In the right, active hands, however, budgeting and forecasting can make a world of difference for your business strategy and outcomes, helping to ensure that you plan for and enjoy a prosperous future.
Budgeting and forecasting are so often discussed in the same breath that they may seem to be the same. In reality, they have two specific, yet inextricably tied, purposes. As Investopedia explains: “budgeting quantifies the expectation of revenues that a business wants to achieve for a future period, whereas financial forecasting estimates the number of revenues that will be achieved. In other words, budgeting lays out the plan for where management wants to take the company, whereas financial forecasting shows whether the company’s headed in the right direction.” So, in this way, budgeting gives you the ideal plan, and forecasting tells you whether or not you’ll be able to execute it.
Budgeting and forecasting could technically exist in isolation from each other – you could make a budget without looking at financial projections for the coming year, or you could forecast your company’s revenues without calculating what you’ll need. However, a budget without a forecast is just a dream scenario for your business (which may or may not be practical), and a forecast without a budget is just a list of projected numbers (without an understanding of what they mean to your company’s goals).
Budgets and forecasts are both more effective when they’re used together. They inform and balance each other, as twin pillars of your business strategy. If your budget and forecasts are in sync, then you know you’re doing well. If your forecasts are far beyond what you’ve budgeted, you probably need to consider expanding your company, since you’re thinking too small. If your forecasts fall far beneath your budget, it’s time to put the pedal to the metal and earn more money.
Sometimes, executives assume that if they just work hard enough and provide a great product, everything will naturally turn out great. In addition, these leaders are often so busy juggling tasks, managing employees, and putting out fires that their present priorities seem much more important than future projections. Furthermore, some might think that budgeting and forecasting should be left to the accounting department.
However, it is actually vital for executives to budget and forecast for their business. As Forbes explains: “while there are stories out there of successful businesses that run without a plan, the ones that do have a plan seem to create a more accurate picture of annual projected income and controlled expenses. These businesses are also easier to sell either to an outside buyer or internal employees and family members.” Even if your venture is soaring, making a budget and forecast can only serve to improve your reputation and garner more trust.
In addition, budgeting and forecasting can make those seemingly ambiguous, “impossible” business decisions quite a bit easier by taking the guesswork out of them. According to Forbes, “knowing when to increase or cut overhead and identify ways to improve efficiency or profitability will be determined by a solid annual forecast and budget report. It can also help you recognize a new opportunity to increase your clientele or take advantage of capitalizing on a new product offering to help offset those months when you’re experiencing the lulls in sales.” Choices that at one time seemed hazy can become crystal clear when you have this information in front of you.
Creating a budget and forecast for your business is a relatively complicated process. It involves gathering up months’ worth of data (expense reports, purchases, sales, etc.), organizing it, analyzing trends, charting your expected needs (budgeting), and income (forecasting).Despite the fact that your records might be digitally documented, it would still be difficult to manually locate all of the right data points you’d need to budget and forecast. Even just thinking about the meticulous tedium of the task can be overwhelming, so imagine having to actually do it all on your own, without Excel’s technological assistance.
Trying your hand at this task manually is likely to be very challenging, taking hours away from other work and wearing you out. Furthermore, budgeting and forecasting all by yourself could lead to errors, which would make your predictions not only useless, but possibly damaging to your enterprise, since you might make plans based on false assumptions. Perhaps worst of all, the monotony of manual budgeting and forecasting without a tool like Excel might be so frustrating that you would forego the activity entirely, preventing you from reaping its numerous benefits.
Excel can help you streamline, automate, and enhance your budgeting and forecasting process, making it easier to foresee (and control) your business’s future. You likely already track all of your company’s most significant statistics in Excel, which makes it even easier for the program to pull the information you need to generate budgets and forecasts. Excel is such a powerful tool for these functions that Microsoft itself provides tutorials on budgeting and forecasting.
Of course, for the optimal experience, our Get Excel Help team can consult with you to learn about your needs, custom-program a solution suited to your venture’s exact needs, and train your team how to use your upgraded software. We can modernize your budgeting and forecasting processes so they’re maximally efficient and effective. With better budgeting and forecasting, you can focus on running, strategizing, and expanding your enterprise.
Get Excel Help is here for you! Contact us today to learn more about our services and take advantage of everything Excel has to offer.