Budgeting Made Easy with Microsoft Dynamics GP

Microsoft Dynamics GP has its own out-of-the-box Excel tool, known as Excel Based Budgeting, that makes the budgeting process of creating and uploading Budget data really quick and easy!

Budgets seamlessly integrate with Microsoft Excel, using an incredibly simple to use Wizard within GP.  It will export ranges of your GP Chart of Accounts, based on Account Type: Balance Sheet, P&L and Unit accounts and Account Segment, allowing divisional or cost centre based budgeting and reporting.  

The spreadsheet created, can also contain prior year balances for each account in separate worksheets, so standard Excel formula can be used to populate the current year budget figures, based on percentage uplift or trends, speeding up the process dramatically.

The Wizard is then used to import the Excel budget figures back into GP. 

The budgets can be imported in sections, as the cost centres are signed off and then either held as separate budgets in GP you can be automatically combined budgets into a single Master Budget.  Alternatively, a master budget may be held in GP and Excel and uploaded, on mass, once the entire budgeting process is complete. 

Multiple budgets can be held for a given year or specified period of time which can span fiscal years in GP. 

Flexing your budget, say, on a quarterly basis, becomes a very simple process as you just have to export the master budget, make you amendments in Excel and upload the new version, using the Budget Wizard, under a new Budget ID.

Account level budget adjustments can be processed as ‘Budget Transactions’, which are user and date stamped, to allow the tracking of any changes.

GP Enquiries: The Budget vs Actual enquiry allows a quick reference to variances on individual accounts, or you can use the Account Roll-up to create bespoke enquiries, grouping ranges of codes based on account segment grouping.  Both enquiries come with drill down on the account level balances and can take you right to the associated transactions, making the identification of the offending transactions, which are blowing you budget, a task that can take just seconds!

Reporting: Using your chosen financial reporting tool and with your budgets in place, it is a straight forward process to create Variance Analysis Reports, showing the favourable and unfavourable differences between Actual and Budget GP figures and Annual Forecast Reports, displaying Actual monthly figures to date and Budgeted figures for the remainder of the year. The screen shots below demonstrate these two reports, using Management Reporter, the standard GP financial reporting tool.  Full account and transaction level drill down is available on these web based reports and reporting trees, breaking down the report, based on divisional or cost centre, can have windows account level security assigned, meaning that cost centre managers can only view those sections of the report for which they are responsible.

Next Steps?

If you are a business that is interested in finding out more about the out of the box budgeting functionality in Dynamics GP, you can by watching our latest on demand webinar that provides some practical demonstrations of the above.

If you are interested in a more comprehensive budgeting solution that provides you with some excellent reporting for your business then please get in touch with one of our GP experts today to discuss your specific business requirements.

Want to get articles like the above delivered straight into your inbox? Be sure to sign up to our mailing list today.