It’s that time of year again: budgeting season. Every department of the business is reviewing and submitting income and expenses from the current year to plan for the next. It’s a critical process—we’ve already dived into some of the basics of budget preparation—and crucial to understanding the current health of the business so organizations can plan for future growth. But budgeting is not without its challenges. 

Facing the Budgeting Challenges

Many businesses face similar sets of challenges when working on their budgeting process. Whether it’s inefficient systems or manual efforts, these challenges can prolong processes and make it difficult to be motivated to even start. 

Time-Consuming Process
When it comes to budgeting, what should be a straightforward exercise is often bogged down in the progress. Budgets must be sent around to the appropriate departments, reviewed, then received back and action taken on the included feedback. It can take multiple go-arounds to come up with a budget that both parties can mostly agree on. 

Considering Every Scenario
It is virtually impossible to plan for every single possible outcome when creating your budgets, but you do need to account for enough variety in scenarios that your budget can remain workable in the midst of several varying situations. You do your best, but a constantly shifting economy can make it difficult to land on even a handful of scenarios to plan for. 

Keeping Budgets Secure
While Excel and Google Sheets are good tools to start the budgeting process, you could run into trouble keeping that sensitive financial information secure since it’s not tied to a secure login such as NetSuite. 

Disjointed Data
With static budgeting worksheets flying across departments, version control can become complicated. If worksheets aren’t dynamically connected to source data such as NetSuite, businesses also run the risk of making plans and decisions based on data that isn’t the most current. 

Solving the Budgeting Process with Excel and NetSuite

All—or at least many—of those challenges likely felt familiar to you, as those are the same ones you’ve battled each year at budgeting season. Budgeting has to be completed, so how do you find ways to make the process a little less painful? 

If you’re already doing some or all of your budgeting in Excel and fear having to leave that behind for a different, possibly more complicated tool, rest assured that’s not what we’re here to suggest. Instead, we actually recommend leveraging Excel more. 

While Excel solves a few budget challenges on its own—namely learning curves and organization-wide access—it’s not until Excel is integrated with your single source of truth, your NetSuite ERP, that it really shines in budgeting. ExtendInsights facilitates that integration and using that can revolutionize your budget process. 

Save Time
While budgets still must be reviewed and agreed upon by various departments, ExtendInsights offers fast and easy uploads to NetSuite right from Excel, bypassing the more time-consuming CSV import action and almost instantly validating data that is being updated and uploaded into NetSuite. Use saved searches to pull the data you need for your budget and build dashboards in Excel using ExtendInsights, and updates to budgets based on feedback happen in a matter of minutes. 

Prepare for Multiple Outcomes
With a live connection back to NetSuite, ExtendInsights Excel budget spreadsheets can easily be adjusted and tweaked for various scenarios and uploaded back to NetSuite. 

Protect Financial Information
ExtendInsights leverages native NetSuite security so that no one has access to information in ExtendInsights that they don’t already have access to directly in NetSuite.

Controlled, Accurate Data
Dynamically connected budget spreadsheets can be refreshed manually or on a regular schedule to ensure that plans are always being made based on the most recent data available. 

Build A Better Budget in 2024

Merging the familiarity and pervasiveness of Excel with the single-source-of-truth aspect that comes from keeping all your data in your NetSuite ERP puts your business in a far more powerful position when it comes time for budgeting for next year. Seamless data integration capabilities ensure that data imported to NetSuite from Excel is complete and accurate, while Excel’s powerful computational and data management capabilities make it the perfect place to work with budgeting data. Combining the two through ExtendInsights makes NetSuite and Excel more powerful, and your team can transform data into clear plans and actionable insights for next year.

Dig into the budgeting process a little deeper with our free, on-demand webinar, Leveraging Excel for Your Easiest NetSuite Budgeting Yet, and get ready to have the best budgeting season.

Already convinced? Give ExtendInsights a try—for free!