Do Better Than a Business Budget Excel Template

Harvard Business Review calls today’s evolving business landscape the 'Era of Volatility.' The last 30 years saw largely peaceful geopolitics, falling interest rates, and moderate inflation, but that’s all about to change. They warn that this next era will be unsettlingly different.

As organizations move into this future, the term 'agility' will gain new importance. To survive, businesses must transform away from their traditional, slow, and cumbersome annual budget processes.

This whitepaper, from the budgeting experts at Solver, details the top budgeting tips, and a business budget Excel template that can set your company up for financial success both now and in the future.

3 New Budgeting Skills to Implement Now

Considering today’s constant uncertainty and relentless upheaval, Harvard Business Review recommends 3 new skills that forward-looking businesses should build:

• Predicting the future
• Using those predictions to change your business more quickly than your competitors; and
• Making smart investments with an expanded view toward long-term resilience, instead of narrowly focusing on short-term profits

Each of these skills requires you to have a firm grasp on your financials. Organizations wishing to succeed with these skills must maintain an agile budget.

HBR is not alone in recommending these changes. An insightful article from FP&A Trends invoked the acronym VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) in support of their conviction.

The future is clear. Companies that will survive this new era will be the ones that successfully align their budgeting processes with our modern business landscape’s rapid pace.

Your Guide Awaits

Does your organization struggle to stay agile? Do you worry that your competitors are acting on information you can’t yet see? Your budgeting processes may be to blame.

Download the whitepaper and discover:

• 10 signs that your budgeting process is “broken”
• Precise steps to take – and in what order – to fix your budget process
• Top 2 ways experts approach their budgeting process
• Advice to choose the right path for your needs
• 5 critical considerations for crafting effective strategic budget goals
• How to run a realistic forecast that limits your “guesswork”

In addition, you will learn 3 tips that better ensure your budget will be approved by the Board, and you’ll gain access to handy tools that you can use to get started with your own agile budgeting process.

How Budget Software for Business Can Help

Knowing how to craft a better, more agile budget is only the beginning. Once you understand what you need to do, your team must roll up their sleeves and dive into the hard work of putting that knowledge into action.

Budget software for business provides seamless, end-to-end capabilities that help midsize organizations save time when collecting and using their financial data, enabling them to easily and continually redesign their working budget.

While good budgeting software offers a solid grounding in Excel and empowers your staff’s “Excel gurus” to manipulate data using familiar formulas and functions, the best budgeting software solutions deliver capabilities well beyond what Excel can provide. These abilities include:

• Automated workflows that keep budget stakeholders on time and accountable for results.
• Seamless integration between financial data and updated performance metrics and KPIs, with flexible forecasts.
• Instant and accurate multi-scenario modeling, including “what ifs” that consider your latest financial information.

Most importantly, budgeting software makes it easy to securely and quickly update your budget in response to unexpected changes. In our Era of Volatility, the one thing you can count on is that you will see many unexpected changes.

But that is in the future. Right now, your first step to plan for a stronger business future is to learn what steps you can take, and in what order, to transform your budgeting process. Your organization deserves to be much more agile than you can accomplish with a traditional business budget Excel template.