Solutions

Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting

Integrated budgeting, forecasting and planning - financial systems management for Businesses Living IN Change (BLINC)™

What is it?

Agresso Planner is a flexible, database-driven budgeting, forecasting and planning tool, which is fully integrated with all core Agresso Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) modules - replacing the use of multiple, diverse, unlinked spreadsheets.

Who is it for?

Planner provides invaluable support for all participants in the planning and budgeting cycles, of even the largest, most complex or fast-changing businesses.

Providing financial systems management, it brings together information from across the organization and key systems to provide a "single version of the truth", from which to plan and make decisions. For example, it:

assists financial managers, who need to gain control over the accuracy, completeness and timeliness of their budgeting process
enables planning departments to create forecasts and perform "what-if" analysis.

How can it help?

Planner assists organizations in the areas of: financial planning and budgeting; resource planning; project planning; and forecasting.

Controlled, efficient, self-service budgeting

With our combination of self-service facilities (allowing access from disparate locations) and workflow (to tightly control the data flow into the budgeting process), you can easily move from centralized to devolved budgeting.

A clearer picture of day-to-day operations

Planner automatically generates supporting transactions from income and expense postings, to support more complete day-to-day operational reporting. So, for instance, a sales entry may trigger an automatic commission entry, which gives rise to changes in the employer's contribution and vacation pay.

Enabling data entry and collaboration from many sources

Planner can integrate data: from existing spreadsheets (thanks to dynamic links into Excel); from external programs; or from end users (via user-defined, web-based input screens). This enables several business divisions or data sources to contribute to the planning and forecasting process, while keeping track of the changes and control over all the data inputs.

Better data security, control and visibility

Sharing the core Agresso ERP system administration and security infrastructure ensures that Planner's user permissions, audit controls, validation and security features are tightly managed and consistent throughout.

Controlled user access, even when data is entered via Excel, to ensure accuracy and security of the underlying database.
Complete audit trail for all data changes, user name and time of the change.

The best of both worlds - simplicity and power

Planner's screens use an Excel-like "front-end", giving users a familiar spreadsheet-like simplicity for data entry and budget modeling. But unlike traditional, static spreadsheets, there is real-time, two-way integration between the underlying database and the front-end, delivering rich functionality and up-to-the-minute data.

A broader, integrated solution

The strengths of the Planner module are multiplied, when used as an integrated part of the broader Agresso ERP solution. For example:

Core Financials - common account and transaction posting rules; shared access to actuals.
Fixed Assets - consolidated forecasts based on asset accounting depreciation schedules.
Project - common project masterfile and shared access to project definition details.
HR - budgeting, including position percentage.
Payroll - automatic generation of payroll budgets, to predict future staff costs with a high level of accuracy.
Performance management - Planner takes advantage of all the standard Agresso reporting, business process automation and analysis tools. For example, users can create and access their own maintainable library of custom reports to match their reporting needs.

What is the Agresso advantage?

Agresso's unique Vita architecture, which delivers true "Post-Implementation Agility", allows changes to your system long after initial installation - in response to changing requirements, at the lowest possible cost and without depending on expensive external consultants or constrained IT resources. This makes Agresso the ideal choice for service-based organizations that are affected by frequent and dynamic business change. We refer to these types of organization as "Businesses Living IN Change (BLINC)^TM".

Underpinned by Vita, Planner is the only planning tool that can adapt to major business change without re-implementation. You can start with a simple budget model and then move to a more complex one, as you identify the areas of the organization where costs are hardest to control.

What does it do?

Agresso Planner tools and features include:

unlimited number of budget versions for analysis, simulation and budget modeling
analysis of Budget vs. Actuals
automatic calculation of amortization and depreciation on assets and investments
multi-currency budgeting
ability to handle funding changes by using the features for virements or balanced budgets
flexible reporting templates and wizards, provided in addition to user-defined reports
multiple user-defined data entry screens, allowing users to decide the sequence of categories when entering data
a range of user-defined features, including:
- o period definition - to determine the starting date and period type of the budget version
- o budget periods - for example : weeks, months, quarters, years
- o budget accounts plus 11 additional analysis categories
accounting rules enforcement, driven by account code or other user-defined criteria
reporting across multiple years
mail distribution of generated reports
ability to attach comments to transactions, allowing for documentation on a detailed level.
the choice of Windows client or web-based deployment