Annual Budgeting – Requirements

These are the requirements for the Annual Budgeting Benchmarking Survey.

1. Distribute pre-populated budget templates to 400 operating units. (3:26)
2. Gather the budgets, and any further modifications in the budgets, from 400 operating units. (4:15)
3. Consolidate at 4 group levels. (4:30)
4. Audit Trail. The breakdown of numbers on the consolidations to be easily accessible. (4:56)
5. Easily access a record of who made any modifications to the budget data and when, which version. (5:32)
6. Easily access any earlier budget version. (6:02)
7. Accommodate multiple Group Maps. These multiple group maps to be easily switchable. (6:22)
8. Budgeting process progress monitoring. After the deadline, close any operating unit to prevent further modifications. (6:54)
9. Side-by-Side report of any group, sub-group, to show the summarised totals for the next level. (7:18)
10. Insert comments on any budget amount entered, or general notes, to be displayed in context. (7:46)
11. Implement the above on a client-server architecture driven by Excel, to work with global reach. (8:45)

More

• Easily manage Access Rights.
• Easily integrate with routine monthly Reporting and Forecasting functions.

Background

A frequent recurring theme on social media, particularly on LinkedIn, is a suggestion that VBA is dead. That these popular features – Office Scripts, Power Query, LAMBDA, Powe Automate, Python, and others – will soon replace Excel VBA.

Meanwhile, the FP&A Tools and Planning industry has joined the chorus from ERP vendors that Excel is unusable in an enterprise.

The demonstration in the video above is a LIVE Excel model that has global reach, and scalable beyond the 400 operating units shown. And extendable to accommodate future extensions and requirements as the needs of the business dictate. It is built upon native Excel capabilities as engineered by Microsoft, and no proprietary Add-Ins are involved.

Alternative solutions are invited from all areas of technology in order to complete this research.

The list of requirements is a collection of typical enterprise budgeting requirements, as visioned by management at board level. They are a collection from my consulting career. However, additional ideas are invited. This is to assist in evaluating the agility of any proposed alternative budgeting solution.

By Hiran de Silva