NetSuite Planning and Budgeting is a game-changer! It changes the traditional, time-consuming planning and budgeting processes. With this unified and scalable solution, finance teams can effortlessly generate budgets, explore different scenarios, and produce insightful reports: no more manual consolidation, troubleshooting, and data loading with NetSuite’s fantastic tool.
Let’s dive deeper into the transformative capabilities of NetSuite Planning and Budgeting.
What is NetSuite Planning and Budgeting?
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting streamlines labor-intensive planning and budgeting processes, empowering finance teams to create budgets and forecasts efficiently, explore what-if scenarios, and generate reports. This comprehensive and scalable solution fosters collaboration, enabling seamless collaboration.
By minimizing time spent on manual consolidation, troubleshooting, reporting, and data loading, finance staff can redirect their efforts from data entry and formula maintenance to strategic analysis activities that significantly impact the company’s financial position.
When you sync your data with NetSuite ERP, you can access the latest financial and operational information instantly. This means less manual data entry and reconciliations, giving you more control.
Plus, the integrated environment encourages stakeholder collaboration, making data collection easier and boosting participation and accountability. And with all your data in one place, you’ll always have a clear and up-to-date view of your business situation.
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Benefits
Reduced Planning Cycle Times: With the help of pre-designed templates and workflows, organizations can significantly reduce the time needed for planning cycles. These templates provide a structured approach for gathering inputs and assumptions, ensuring that all the important information is captured efficiently.
Accurate Information: With pre-built synchronization, you can have real-time and accurate financial and operational data from NetSuite ERP. It helps you make informed decisions and optimize business performance.
Align the Organization: Users can say goodbye to long email chains and complicated spreadsheets by bringing everyone involved in one collaborative space. This way, users can communicate seamlessly, work more efficiently, and create a connected and productive environment.
Increased Transparency: When everyone keeps entering data and following standardized processes, the system does a great job of tracking and recording all changes. This means users have a higher level of transparency across the board, which is fantastic.
Improved Forecast Accuracy: Always aim to improve forecast accuracy by regularly comparing and analyzing actual and projected results. This iterative process allows you to refine and fine-tune forecasts, ensuring they’re reliable and effective in guiding decision-making.
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Top 8 Features
Budgeting and Forecasting
NetSuite’s prebuilt workflows, designed with best practices in mind, make tracking the progress of tasks like reviews and approvals very efficient. Budget templates automatically update with data from NetSuite’s general ledger, accommodating any changes to accounting segments.
With real-time forecasts generated in minutes using actual data from NetSuite financials, users have the insights needed to make informed decisions and propel their business forward.
Scenario Planning and Modeling
Users can perform scenario modeling and multidimensional planning with any number of dimensions, like location, product, customer, or expense. It’s easy to model complex calculations, including projected revenue, operating and capital expenditures, headcount costs, cash flow, and sales. NetSuite users don’t have to worry about formula errors when regularly updating or monthly maintenance.
Revenue Planning
Make sure to align your revenue forecasts and sales plans with your corporate objectives. Creating driver-based revenue and sales forecasts for all business units in collaboration with your finance, sales, and service teams is essential. Remember to continuously monitor your performance against your objectives and track the impact on your cash flows and balance sheets.
Operational Expense
With flexible driver-based planning, NetSuite users can effortlessly connect their operational assumptions to financial outcomes. This comprehensive approach supports a hierarchical planning process that aligns corporate finance with lines of business, ensuring a cohesive connection between strategic objectives and financial targets.
Workforce Planning
NetSuite simplifies and improves the company’s workforce planning and related initiatives. This includes managing headcount, structuring salaries, and planning compensation.
Companies can efficiently achieve organizational objectives by aligning their organization’s needs with those of their workforce. This comprehensive approach ensures that your workforce strategy aligns with your overall business goals, leading to increased productivity, engagement, and success.
Trended Financial Statements
NetSuite provides fully integrated financial statements in which the income, balance sheet, and cash flow statements are connected. This connection is based on the logic derived from Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). These financial statements provide seamless trending from actual to budget, and the integration is flexible enough to accommodate industry-specific configuration requirements.
NetSuite Dashboards
Companies can effortlessly create dashboards to display their budget and data in minutes. With NetSuite’s drag-and-drop report builder, finance and business managers can access powerful, user-friendly web-based reporting.
The system’s collaborative and secure approach makes it easy to define, author, review, and publish financial and management reports. Plus, the drill-through capabilities allow the finance team and business managers to dive deep into the numbers and better understand budget vs. actual variances.
Microsoft Office Integration
Last, smart view for Office allows you to seamlessly integrate NetSuite budgeting and planning with your favorite Microsoft Office tools like Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. With this integration, you can easily perform what-if analysis in Excel for customers, items, or expense categories.
You can also create data grids in Excel that include formulas and formats to visualize and analyze your data. Plus, you can access everyday planning actions, such as spreading and allocation, right within Excel.
Challenges NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Solves
NetSuite budgeting and planning solve common challenges by automating manual tasks and eliminating errors in data transfers. It seamlessly integrates with NetSuite financial information, making everything smoother.
Moreover, it encourages collaboration by allowing users to share comments and assumptions throughout the planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes. Plus, it empowers more informed decision-making with quick budget-to-actual comparisons, providing timely insights for better choices.
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Cost
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting comes with a cost that businesses of all sizes, from startups to growing companies, must consider. When you subscribe to NetSuite, you pay an annual fee for your license. This fee includes three main parts: the core platform, optional modules, and the number of users.
Plus, there’s a one-time fee for the initial setup during implementation. The great thing about using cloud software like NetSuite is that you can easily activate new modules and add more users as your business expands. And if you specifically want NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, you can include it as an additional module in your subscription.
Final Thoughts
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting is a game-changer for financial processes. It offers streamlined planning cycles, real-time data sync from NetSuite ERP, and collaborative features. It addresses challenges by automating tasks and boosting collaboration.
Yes, there’s a cost, but the scalability allows businesses to adapt quickly. The transformative power of NetSuite Planning and Budgeting empowers finance teams to shift their focus from manual tasks to strategic analysis, ultimately optimizing decision-making and fostering sustainable growth.
