NetSuite Planning and Budgeting: Make Your Financial Processes Effective

Introducing NetSuite Planning and Budgeting

Every business has financial planning, forecasting, and budgeting needs. Its better to have the right tool for managing these needs effectively. And, what better solution than the NetSuite planning and budgeting platform to improve your financial accuracies and efficiencies?

Need for NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Solution

Every business has set goals to achieve, including operational and financial objectives. Achieving these goals and objectives is possible only with proper financial planning. Financial planning involves managing your money to avoid financial roadblocks in the journey of achieving business goals.

Financial planning and budgeting are primarily essential to develop investors’ interests in your business plan. It helps in:

Managing money
Handling taxes and charges
Improving cash flows
Taking financial decisions
Paying off debt
Preparing for emergencies

And having a proper financial planning and budgeting tool can make this possible easily. Spreadsheets can be a helpful tool, but you may be compromising accuracy, efficiency, and time. Therefore, having an integrated cloud solution is the best answer.

NetSuite planning and budgeting is a cloud solution that automates the process of planning, budgeting, forecasting, and generating reports. Let’s look into the NetSuite planning and budgeting platform and its various benefits to you:

NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Overview

NetSuite planning and budgeting allows financial planning for the company and department-wise. You can develop detailed and accurate budgets to be shared across the company. You can also compare the actual with estimated to draw insights useful for decision-making.

The NetSuite financial planning platform helps you to:

Develop budgets and forecasts
Perform scenario modelling with different dimensions
Develop sales and revenues forecasts and monitor them
Plan for operational expenses and workforce factors
Develop financial statements
View the entire financial performance over dashboards

Features and Functionalities of NetSuite Planning and Budgeting

NetSuite planning and budgeting platform has the following features and functionalities:

1. Budgeting and Forecasting in NetSuite

Creating budgets is easier in the NetSuite budgeting solution. You don’t need to feed or transfer data from one sheet to another. The software has templates and pre-built reports, making it easier for you to prepare and compare budgets.

The NetSuite budgeting platform supports multiple currencies and subsidiaries, adding to the ease of budget preparation. You can access the projections for revenue, operating expenses, workforce planning, and other data.

2. Revenue planning with NetSuite financial planning

You can make assumptions based on changing market conditions to your revenue forecasts. The NetSuite planning and budgeting solution allows you to combine revenue forecasts of different business units to get an overall prediction. You can monitor the actual revenues and compare them with the projections to identify the impact on financial performance.

3. Generating Financial Statements

The NetSuite planning and budgeting solution generates accurate and timely financial statements. The balance sheet, cash flow, and P&L statement follow the accounting framework you feed in. You can compare the historical statements with the current ones to draw conclusions and make decisions.

4. Scenario Planning and Modelling

You can consider dimensions such as product, expense, customer, or location to create different models. You can plan scenarios with these dimensions to calculate business performance against the stated objectives.

You can also use predictive analytics, rolling forecasts, and other advanced modelling techniques to understand your financial situation. Thus, the modelling aspect of the NetSuite planning platform leads to projected revenues, resources costs, cash flow, operating expenditures, and sales calculations.

5. Projecting Operational Expenses

NetSuite planning and budgeting platform allows every department to prepare the projections of their operational expenses. After that, you can collate and get a picture of the company’s operational expenses. Later, you can compare the projected figures with actual figures to know where you went wrong.

6. Workforce Planning

You can decide the budget for human resources and related processes for it. Based on this, you can hire the right people, spend an amount on them within the budget, and allocate proper responsibilities in line with business objectives. NetSuite planning and budgeting allows you to collate data from finance, HR, and payroll departments to determine the right salary, bonus, incentives, taxes, etc.

7. Creating Dashboards

The solution has dashboards that give you the complete picture of your financial performance. You can compare actual vs budgeted and historical vs current data. You can generate financial reports based on different metrics and performance indicators.

NetSuite planning and budgeting solution immediately reflects the changes or updates made to the data. It has dashboard templates, which you can customize based on your industry needs and display data. Since the information is shared across departments, creating and publishing insightful reports is easier.

Challenges that NetSuite planning and budgeting solution overcomes

Generally, businesses use spreadsheets for financial calculations and budgeting. But these are not proper tools because of their labour-intensiveness and time-taking efforts. NetSuite planning and budgeting platform can solve the problems faced in using spreadsheets.

Error-prone Data

The chances of error are high when you manually enter data in spreadsheets or copy-paste from one sheet into another. Also, if you make a last-minute change in one sheet and forget to do it in another (since it is not linked), it may have serious consequences. This affects the preparation of budgets, forecasts, and financial planning because you have data errors.

In the case of the NetSuite planning solution, you do not need to make separate datasheets for all departments; a shared data repository is available to all. If you make one change in any sheet, it reflects in all the linked sheets and calculations. Thus, there are no chances of errors.

Fragmented and Old Data

Spreadsheets do not give a complete picture of your financial performance because of no real-time updating. At one point in time, it gives you a view of the historical data you have entered and saved. If you do not put the latest numbers, you cannot provide the actual status of your financial performance.

Also, spreadsheets lead to fragmented data because every department enters and saves data required for their own analysis. Thus, you get a fragmented analysis of the company’s performance, but not as a whole. It can affect your strategic decision-making.

The NetSuite CRM Solution has one common data repository for all departments, making it easy to collate data and keep it updated.

Time-Taking Activity

Spreadsheets require you to spend a lot of time manually adding entries, updating links and formulas, and transferring the data from one sheet to another. Also, it is difficult to share these sheets with other departments; hence, a lot of time goes into data consolidation. Such time-taking activities delay your preparation of financials, budgets and other data-intensive documents.

The best part about the NetSuite planning and budgeting module is the time you save because there is no requirement for lengthy calculations or copy-pasting data from one sheet to another. Thus, you save time, which can be used to focus on core decisions.

Data Consolidation

When you use spreadsheets, every department prepares its own. To get a business-wide view of your financial performance, you need to consolidate data from different spreadsheets into a single master sheet. There are possibilities of change in business conditions during the consolidation of data. Hence, the final data may not give the actual, updated picture.

Consider a similar case when multinationals with subsidiaries spread over different countries consolidate data. Most prepare data in local currencies and languages and with varying accounting rules. In such cases, it is a big challenge to consolidate data.

A single data repository shared between all departments and business units in the NetSuite planning and budgeting solution makes the calculations easier and faster.

Collaboration

Spreadsheets involve formulas and links, which employees forget to add when copy-pasting to other sheets. Errors, once made, feature in other spreadsheets as well when copy-pasted. Also, employees update the numbers in one sheet and forget to update in others. All this leads to many mistakes and inaccuracies, which are also reflected in the budget.

Thus, the collaboration between departments is difficult to achieve with spreadsheets. And without collaboration, departments use non-updated data, leading to misaligned decisions. All of this leads to more confusion and non-achievement of goals.

Collaboration is easier in the NetSuite budgeting solution because every team has access to the same master file. It leads to faster discussions and decisions.

Advanced Analysis and Reporting

In spreadsheets, it isn’t easy to look at data from multiple dimensions. This limits the scope of analysis, and generating more insights becomes a challenge. You cannot look at all factors; thus, decisions may exclude certain business aspects. Specifically, when the business conditions change continuously, advanced analysis and reporting are challenging in spreadsheets.

NetSuite Planning and Budgeting reports help management take informed business decisions resulting in higher profitability and achievement of business goals.

Benefits of NetSuite Planning and Budgeting

You have better control over your data because of automation and real-time updates.
The in-built templates and frameworks help make the work easier, more accurate, and faster.
It leads to effective collaboration between departments for data and inputs because of a single, shared repository.
You get complete visibility of business performance through insightful reports and dashboards.
Transparency is higher because the same processes are used across the company, leading to the monitoring of changes.
You can compare actual vs budgeted easily to track your performance and make decisions.
Errors and time to prepare financial data reduce, leading to more efficiencies and productivity.
You can monitor your headcount, track their performance, and plan your workforce.

Thus, with all these benefits to your financial processes, you must soon contact a NetSuite planning and budgeting implementation partner. The merits of this platform will add more value to your business with a reduction in effort and efficiency in processes.

NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Services Cost

You have to pay an annual license fee for the NetSuite platform. The fee amount changes depending on the number of users and modules you select. Since NetSuite planning and budgeting is an add-on module, you can choose it for your business. The NetSuite planning and budgeting cloud services cost depends on the services you take.

NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Training

We provide NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Training to increase productivity of the users and derive true value out of your NetSuite ERP investment. Our NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Training ensures:

Increased NetSuite Planning and Budgeting adoption in the company
Higher efficiency of users of the NetSuite Planning and Budgeting module
No duplication of efforts
Time saving

NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Implementation Partners

Cloudiotech is one of the leading NetSuite planning and budgeting implementation partners in the UAE. We help you with the NetSuite implementation, NetSuite customization, integration, and NetSuite training services. We resolve all your queries and provide comprehensive support with NetSuite solutions.

Cloudiotech’s NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Solution

takes your financial planning to the next level.