Budgeting & Forecasting

Finance departments have been placed under increasing strain in recent years to cope with the demand for more frequent and sophisticated budgets and forecasts. The GFC only accelerated a trend that requires finance to produce credible and flexible numbers that can be used to drive the business, and manage associated risks. In conjunction with this the traditional budgeting cycle is now being challenged with the introduction of rolling forecast and driver-based calculation models to allow for an "ever-ready" and flexible business plan. Existing manual and spreadsheet-centric processes struggle to cope with this transformation, and top performing finance departments have increasingly implemented system based solutions to keep up with the pace of change.

Implementation of a planning application such as SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC) can drive the following business benefits:

• Reduce the time and complexity to create your annual budget
• Model your business and perform 'what if' scenario analysis
• Increase control over your budgeting process
• Move to rolling monthly forecasts with minimal incremental effort

Extend has expertise in: SAP BusinessObjects Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC), legacy SAP planning tools, and integration into complete SAP BusinessObjects and Microsoft solutions.

Solution benefits include:

• Native Excel user-interface that combines the flexibility and familiarity of Excel formatting, formulas and presentation with the strengths of an underlying system database
• Choice of either Microsoft or SAP BW platforms with the ability to integrate data from multiple source systems providing a step-change in productivity, data quality and security
• Enterprise level reporting and analysis with options to combine actual and planned data in a real time environment
• Sophisticated calculation engine that enables driver-based budgeting, and modelling of enterprise scenarios
• Customisable process-flows to streamline and control the submission process
• Context sensitive action panes to guide end-users through the system according to their roles and access
• Interactive dashboards with the ability to model planning values and write back the results to BPC
• Integrate planning with advanced costing and profitability tools
• Integrate planning with strategy management and balanced scorecard
• Single solution for planning and consolidation enabling you to produce consolidated financial budgets

Related Topic: IFRS Consolidation

Working with Extend Technologies

Our Business Intelligence group, leveraging our process-centric functional expertise and deep technical experience, have developed pre-packaged project accelerators, enabling us to reduce project time and cost, and deliver tried and tested solutions. Our accelerators include:

• Financial Cost Centre and Profit Centre planning
• Sales and Gross Profit planning
• Balance Sheet and Cash Flow planning
• Salary and On Cost planning

The modular nature of the application allows customers to choose a solution that is best suited to their business needs, and if required develop functionality over-time. During the pre-sales process we can quickly determine if a pre-packaged solution or custom build is best for your organisation.