NEUBRAINER, the official blog of Neubrain

Since early 2020, the world has been forced to quickly adapt to unprecedented circumstances presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. Government organizations have been at the forefront of the crisis dealing with a plethora of issues. These include unanticipated costs incurred from the pandemic response, double-digit declines in tax revenue, consequences of eliminating or reducing services to citizens, and delaying critical infrastructure projects, which drastically impacted the communities they serve.

High performing Comptroller organizations can add tremendous organizational value beyond just financial transaction processing and audit readiness tasks.

By leading in the establishment of key processes, promoting enterprise-wide collaboration and a disciplined financial management culture, they can drastically improve the ability of an organization to achieve performance targets, strengthen the link between financial plans and strategic objectives, and enhance strategic decision-making.

As technologies advance, the global marketplace changes, and the economy ebbs and flows, it is apparent that traditional budgeting practices are becoming a relic of the past. With the right strategies and technologies in place, public sector organizations can develop a more strategic budget process...

Large and complex organizations maintain a strategic focus on processes and systems to manage their workforce. Despite being one of the largest expenditure items, workforce expenditures are typically neglected and left to finance to manage with a complex set of spreadsheets. Oftentimes there is not enough collaboration between HR and finance groups, leaving a huge disconnect between people and dollars. Greater control and a true picture of payroll dollars are more important than ever with organizational growth, changing priorities, budgetary constraints, and other factors that influence the workforce.  

It is a common mistake to assume that automation alone will bring necessary budget process improvements to an organization. Automating an inefficient or unintelligent bud­get process just makes the same process faster, not better.

The reality is traditional practices that govern budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting and  risk management are becoming obsolete in the context of a fast paced digital marketplace and a volatile and uncertain global economy. Long established budget practices provide a false sense of security and fail to cope with the speed and volatility of today’s markets.

Additionally, the traditional budgeting process is widely de­cried, both by FP&A personnel—who must reconcile the requests from business managers with the targets handed down from the C-suite—and the business line managers they support—who view the budget process as a bureau­cratic exercise, a distraction from their job, a drag on their time, and a purely finance-driven process.

As you consider a new budget system, remember this is the optimal time to evaluate the strategies that can help your organization develop a more agile and intelligent budget process, use this process as decision making tool rather than a negotiation, and positively change your orga­nization’s perception of budgeting.

The following are a few strategies and best practices to consider:

While most modern budgeting software solutions can eliminate the basic spreadsheet challenges associated with data capture and simple aggregation, they typically do not take the next step: enabling the organization to use its data to improve budget decisions and the linkages between budgets and outcomes.

Often times we see “user-friendly” as a key criterion in the evaluation of budgeting software products, or hear “we have implemented a new budgeting software, but it is not user-friendly”. A system's user interface determines how users interact with the system; therefore, it is a very important aspect of the total user experience with the system. But is it all about the interface or is there more to consider? What makes a system user-friendly: is it visually appealing interface design, or a familiar Excel-like interface, or maybe something else?

After seeing a lot of hype and confusion caused by software vendors positioning their products as the most user-friendly based on a some sort of feature: familiar excel interface, web-based or cloud-based (and therefore, somehow by default, user-friendly), Neubrain experts decided to shed some light on the topic and share key considerations in selecting and implementing a user-friendly budgeting system.