Why Budget Automation?

I start this issue by asking how many advantages do I get automating the budget of the company?  There are many answers, but let’s see some that have been observed over the years of experience:

• Increased Budget Control and therefore better financial results to make the right decisions at the right time.

• Increased ability to foresee risks in the immediate and medium term.

• Ability to assess and anticipate financial scenarios.

• Increased financial efficiency margins.

• Ability to better align my team. Determine their functions and focus on the real objectives of the company.

• A strategic vision aligned to financial and operational objectives of the company is observed.

• Uniqueness of the financial issues of the company. "We talk about the same."

• Etc…

Now, how do I begin to build the initiative to automate the budget?

We must look at different aspects and how these aspects help me in that determination.

Let's see what I have to do to determine the important aspects of each agent.

• Me: I represent the thrust of the initiative; I am the owner and beneficiary of the solution. I must explain as from me benefit each other agents.

• My team: must be convinced of the direct benefits that brings this initiative and offer you a reorientation of duties that allow them to have more time to analyze and less time to execute operational activities.

• Collaborating teams: every month, those teams help to financials to understand the industry movements, the hard competition and the general news about I+D. We can say Marketing, Sales, Business / Product, Risk and Compliance. All are geared to form a united team to make a single message to the shareholders of the company. Now this gear does not flow by itself, it requires effort and extra work. How to convince these teams to support and participate in this initiative? Will they benefit from new package of information in short time? Will the better understand the financial aspects of their areas? Etc. Convince them!

• IT Tem: the enormous efforts of the IT team should be directly benefited with this initiative, perhaps 50-80% reduction of work to be achieved. They will support you if you offer a work plan with reduced activities, increased efficiency, more control and less work. Remember, without their support you can hardly successfully push the proposal.

• Sponsor: the biggest beneficiary of these initiatives, the sponsor must see in these projects the ability to light the numbers that were in the shadows. Should be able to make decisions based on facts to tack or maintain the course of the company. If the sponsor is not able to achieve this, then reformulates the project.

The company's financial statements should speak for themselves, actions and turns must be appreciable finally here. The shareholder must clearly see that investment is in good hands.

Show me what you offer.

Asks the consulting firm to show you what they refer to processes automation, watch it and judge it with your team. Ask a lot of questions. Try to put your business culture in this new process and prepares a report with the results to your potential sponsor. Do not let them convince you without evidence.

Ask for an ideal team of consultants to achieve the objectives. Evaluate the ability of team to communicate. This is very important to achieve the expected results of the project.

Test what they say.

Try to emulate an activity inside the consultant demo where are involved all agents described above and estimated results with the deliverables you expect to receive and their results.

	Data Load	Process Visualization	Time	Activities	Reports
Me	N/A	All	Decrease 100%	Decrease 20%	Online
My team	Decrease 150%	All	Decrease 200%	Decrease 150%	Online and Control
Collaboration Teams	Decrease 80%	Now On	Decrease 50%	Decrease 1 day	Online and same data
IT Team	Decrease 200%	No	Decrease 120%	Decrease 3 days	Independence
Sponsor	N/A	All	10x faster decisions	Less meetings and 10x faster	Online
The Company	Decrease 5 days to close books	All	Financial Statements 10x faster	Business plan 95% accurate	Online

  

Calculates and calculates.

Analyzes the ROI of the project, asks for help to consultants. Determine with sponsor:

• How many bad decisions could have been avoided last year and translate it into money.

• How many good decisions could increase the value of bad decisions and translate into money.

• Check Compliances assessment with regulatory indicators and measure how many goals were breached and its financial impact.

• Analyze the market share of the company and calculates the impact of the next 36 months assuming you keep in the same trend. Now, calculate present value.

• Compare the budget with reality and determine the absolute variance.

• Others.

Take those figures and add it all, result must be multiply it by the opportunity cost of the company. If the company is in the Stock Exchange, take previous number and multiply with the beta of the industry and by two (annual basis) .

This result is the photo in terms of inefficency of the company in two years without your new proposal. Discuss it!.