Budgeting

Companies that use their annual budgets as a planning tool are likely to make their resources go further. While developing a strategic budget is often time-consuming and complex, it is fundamental in ensuring that your organization is financially healthy and is on target to meet its mission. As a systematic tool, budgeting gives you the predictive intelligence to detect problems before they have major financial consequences. Budgeting also helps you shift from a reactive mode and allows you to take a proactive approach towards your goal of profitable financial management. Creating and executing a methodical budget that supports your organization’s strategic goals and drives decision making is a central part of your organizational success. PowerPlan is a user-friendly tool that is configured around your business needs and is aimed at helping you achieve your performance goals.

Analysis

Ease of access to timely and accurate information pertaining to the well-being of any organization is not merely necessary, but is fundamental. Efficient analytical tools allow management to spot emerging challenges and opportunities – and more importantly allow management to quickly respond in a proactive manner. Whether you’re an executive keeping a close eye on key performance measurements, a financial manager drilling into the transaction level details of the financial statements, or a line manager observing key operational stats, we provide powerful analysis capabilities to help you better manage your business.

Reporting

The need for meaningful data, whether in the form of a specialized information request or simply a routine format, remains a major demand in today’s business environment. The ability to easily obtain this critical information is why an exceptional reporting tool is of the essence. Information must of course be reliable, but also needs to be presented in an intuitive and recognizable manner. PowerPlan’s sophisticated, yet easy-to-use, reporting capabilities provide users with quick access to customary reports, but more importantly allow users to slice and dice data to dynamically create summary or detailed views as desired. PowerPlan views can be used for online reporting or may be generated as hard copy printed reports.

Capital Expenditure Budgeting

The capital expenditure module of PowerPlan supports the entire capital expense budgeting lifecycle; including preparation of capital expenditure requests, approval of capital expenses, and monitoring of expenditures against approved and budgeted capital requests.  Access to capital expenditure information is based on multiple levels of security.  Status reports display budgeted, committed, or expended amounts and variances.

Payroll Budgeting

Employees are unquestionably an organization’s most valuable asset; therefore, it should come as no surprise that payroll constitutes a vast portion of any overall expense budget. Payroll budgeting has become increasingly important as we plan the landscape of our existing and future business needs with supporting headcount details. PowerPlan’s payroll budgeting module allows detailed compensation planning on an employee-by-employee basis, and enables planning for new hires or reductions in force to satisfy the projected business model and anticipated business volume.

Driver-Based Planning

As planning and budgeting become increasingly significant functions in our ongoing operations, we should look to deviate from the static quo process and seek improved methodologies for developing efficient planning models. Likewise, planning and budgeting should be widespread functions involving all staff members that contribute wholly or in part to the organization’s profitability and success. Many companies have realized this need and have adopted a driver-based planning approach, increasing participation and distributing accountability where it belongs – across the various levels of the organization. PowerPlan allows you to construct a plan model that utilizes the key parameters that drive your business.

Budget Details

Itemizing the supporting details for a plan is not only meaningful, but is often essential for justifying the request and for mitigating approval.  PowerPlan accommodates two types of budget details – standard budget details and enhanced budget details:

• Standard Budget Details

PowerPlan’s standard budget details enable free-form input in order to list supporting details for an account during the plan input process.  These detailed line items are then summed up to update the corresponding account, entity, planning scenario, and year for which the details were created.  Identifying where budget details exist is simple since a red flag is displayed in the upper left hand corner of the account description.  When printing PowerPlan reports, users have an option to include or exclude budget details associated with the selected report.

• Enhanced Budget Details

It is sometimes necessary for supporting details to come from a standardized source.  For example, when a significant portion of a company’s revenue comes from donors, it is conceivable that a list of key donors should be made available for planning purposes.  PowerPlan’s enhanced budget details functionality allows the user to select the budget detail line items from a pre-defined item list (such as a donor list).

Notes

Documenting the plan and accounting for any noticeable changes or unusual deviations from the expected data is unquestionably a critical step in the input process.  PowerPlan’s Notes feature can be used to effectively document plan data during the update and/or review process.  

A user can add a note or a series of notes to any account.  These notes are stored on the basis of the specific account, entity, planning scenario, and year for which they are generated.  Identifying where notes exist is trouble-free since a yellow flag is displayed in the upper left hand corner of the account description.  When printing PowerPlan reports, users have an option to include or exclude notes associated with the selected report.

Decision Package Analysis

A decision package in PowerPlan is a budget request by a business unit for projects or services covering specific objectives for the upcoming fiscal year. These budget packages include new positions, operations and maintenance related requests, efficiency or performance related projects. The business units can rank the packages for management review.

The approved decision packages become part of the next fiscal year operating budgets.

Dashboard

PowerPlan's powerful managment dashboard facility provides an at-a-glance look at the key performance indicators that drive your business.