Creating an effective budget and planning tool in Excel is typically not difficult, especially for financial team members who know how to run the world in Excel. The time consuming part are the many links and macros to create summary consolidated results. Then there is the added risk of someone inserting a row or column that breaks the links and the integrity of the reports. This then leads to checks and balances added to the calculations and soon you have a growing monster.

Once you are done, many organizations have created a planning process that no longer makes it possible to integrate into Dynamics GP and so a link is added to FRx requiring time consuming mapping of row definitions. Typically about this time is when at least one person in the organization has achieved a high level of job security.

Excel Based Budgeting eliminates the need to create complex links to summarize the budget results or to create integrations into GP. Starting with Excel Based Budgeting create excel worksheets by each planning area, adding prior year amounts can give managers a good starting point. The worksheets are created all ready to import monthly amounts back into GP so there is no need to create any consolidation files in Excel, just let FRx handle the reporting requirements.

Your current FRx reports are ready to use with just a minor change to the column definitions, just point to the new budget in GP and run the FRx reports, that’s it! Next, make all needed budget changes to the Excel files, import the changes back into GP, and run the FRx reports. Make as many reiterations as you would like. Once you reach the 1^st pass for management review, duplicate the budget in GP creating a new budget for the 2^nd pass and retain the 1^st pass. This gives you great versioning control although inevitably someone with change something and you will still need to investigate who and why. Having version control helps you maintain some control of the inevitable “mysterious budget change”!

Excel Based Budgeting comes with the GL module and is a great budget tool! With unlimited budgets in GP use this module as much and as often as needed. Create 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd quarter reforecast by combining actual and budget months in a new Budget ID. Remember to use the Scotty rule of never telling the Executive team how quickly you can have the reforecast ready for new projections.

Excel Based Budgeting will work great until, if ever, your planning process starts to struggle with managing the logistics of who needs to do what and when. Once that starts, check out the Forecaster module and sleep better at night.