5 Common Budgeting Challenges & How SIP Solves Them

Enter Sage Intacct Planning (SIP) – an intuitive budgeting and forecasting tool designed to help you easily build detailed budgets, unlock insights faster and get ahead of the curve.

In this article we’ll explore how Sage Intacct Planning solves the most common budgeting & forecasting challenges businesses face.

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Common Budgeting Challenges

Here are the 5 most common budgeting challenges we hear all the time:

• Time consuming: Building your budget takes too long.
• Disconnected: Your budget isn’t aligned with your business.
• Lack of flexibility: You can’t easily try out different scenarios.
• Inaccuracies: You’re not confident enough in your numbers.
• Collaboration: You’re emailing different versions back and forth.

Sounds familiar? Let’s explore how SIP can do the heavy lifting for you.

1. Time Consuming

Building out your budget in an Excel spreadsheet manually and importing it into your financial system is extremely time-consuming. This often means you can’t find the time during the year to review your budget and adjust it according to changes in conditions.

Solution: SIP is quick and easy to set up and includes pre-defined templates which can be customised to your preferences. With powerful tools at your fingertips, budgeting becomes a much less daunting task. You can easily revisit your budget yearly, monthly and quarterly, while gaining more time to use the insights for making strategic decisions and identifying areas for improvement.

2. Disconnected

Having your budget static in a spreadsheet and separate from your finance system restricts its value and means that your budget doesn’t reflect internal changes or market factors, so the data quickly becomes outdated.

Solution: The two-way flow of data between Sage Intacct and SIP enables you to share data between both systems, including:

• Use actuals from your financials in your plans
• Take your GL accounts and previous year’s budget
• Feeding your budget & forecast back into your core system

The dynamic dashboards give you instant access to real-time insights, so you can monitor your performance throughout the year and compare your actual to your forecast.

3. Lack of Flexibility

We’ve all experienced it – you change one little thing in your spreadsheet, and it wreaks havoc with your formulas and breaks other tabs.

Solution: With SIP, you don’t have to worry about any of that. You have the flexibility to adjust your plans easily, try out different tweaks and hold multiple budgets for different departments, currencies and more. The ‘what-if’ scenario analysis allows you to build any number of scenarios to play around with and understand how different variables will impact profitability.

4. Inaccuracies

Manually entering data into Excel increases the risk of inaccuracies, so you’ll most likely find yourself second-guessing the numbers.

Solution: SIP has built-in financial intelligence and calculation logic which ensures consistency and accuracy. SIP also aligns with performance, market dynamics, variables and intelligence, rather than just looking at the previous year. You can also verify where the intelligence has come from in just a few clicks by clicking the drill-down links.

5. Collaboration

Emailing or sharing spreadsheets back and forth with colleagues can become messy and unsecure. You may end up looking at different versions of the same document, which causes confusion and inefficiency.

Solution: With SIP, you can collaborate with ease. You have full control over which users can view, edit, import and export data to which part of the budget. It’s also user friendly for anyone to use, they don’t have to be finance experts or figure out complex formulas.

• Collaborate with your colleagues in real-time
• Everyone always has access to the latest version
• See who updated the budget and when
• Build, edit and present budget plans

“The first time I pulled up Sage Intacct Planning in our executive team meeting, they were absolutely blown away by how quickly I was able to create a scenario, plug in what they were asking for, and show the results in real-time.”
– Natalie Bonczek, Controller, Red Door Interactive

Sage Intacct Specialists

Our team is fully accredited in all Sage Intacct modules and have experience working with various industries. For more information about the Sage Intacct Planning module and to see it for yourself, click here to read more and watch a short video.

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To speak to our Sage Intacct specialists, please complete the enquiry form.