The main reason businesses rely on Effectplan is it significantly simplifies corporate budgeting processes. However, most companies quickly find that the software provides many other benefits!
Businesses who choose Effectplan software are primarily interested in streamlining and improving their budgeting work. They are looking for fewer sources of error, a quicker and more efficient budgeting processes, as well as greater flexibility.
The feedback we receive clearly shows that once businesses install a modern tool for handling budgeting processes, there are several additional advantages.
There are a few of the many ways SMBs and larger enterprises benefit from Effectplan:
#1 Greater engagement and ownership of the budgeting process
When budgeting work no longer requires the managers of the various departments to enter anonymous figures into flaky Excel spreadsheets (with the risk of introducing errors and potentially derailing the entire company’s budgeting process), managers are free to make more detailed plans. And the fact that managers and other departments can drill right down into the details of each department’s budgets tends to concentrate the minds of middle managers too.
#2 Access control provides better security
Effectplan has access control functions that save you the worry of anyone gaining unauthorized access to confidential or sensitive data. This means that once the access levels have been defined, more people can be involved in both budgeting and forecasting work, without potentially compromising salary information or other personal data.
#3More time for more strategic tasks
The feedback is clear: customers save time – sometimes a lot of time – setting up their budgets. The time saved is mainly used to take a more strategic and holistic look at business operations, but in some contexts it can also give the company room to expand operations without upping their headcount.
#4 Reliable figures increase respect for budgets
With the risk of version and keying errors in Excel out of the picture, there is less need for quality assurance – it is simply not necessary to go back to check the numbers, formulas and calculations. Higher-quality figures result in higher-quality budgets, which in turn means that the budgets are accorded greater respect throughout the organisation.
#5 Forecasting and follow-up
Once you have created a budget in Effectplan, it only takes a few keystrokes and minutes to prepare the numbers for forecasting. The same integrations and data links that were set up for budgeting work are transferred to the forecasting work, enabling users to compare budgets to forecasts as often as they want.
Opportunities for analysis, drill-down and cost tracking: Once the customer has linked Effectplan to other relevant systems, data from these systems can be collated, consolidated and illuminated from different angles – and not just compared against budget. This enables anyone in the company to process the numbers in a way that creates new, valuable insight into business operations – without having to know anything at all about programming!
#6 Dashboards, and reporting
Maybe your company already uses Qlik, Power BI, Business Analyze or a similar tool for visualizing data? Effectplan enables you to build on and reinforce your existing reports by visualizing operations against budget.