The best budgeting solutions for financial success

Did you know 79% of finance professionals are dissatisfied with their current budgeting solution? Or that only 31% of them say they’ve made significant changes to resolve this? of them say they’ve made significant changes to resolve this?

Many finance teams rely on inefficient spreadsheets and slow manual processes for budgeting, financial planning, and analysis, but moving away from these can be a challenge in itself. The inertia of existing workflows makes them difficult to replace, getting buy-in from stakeholders for a new solution is an uphill battle, and getting everyone trained on the software or method you end up using is itself time-consuming and resource-intensive.

However, dedicated budgeting software is essential for building more accurate budgets in less time with enough flexibility to adapt to anything. This platform needs to handle all your budgeting needs in one place, automate manual work, and be user-friendly enough that your team can start using it in days—not months.

What sets Prophix’s budgeting solutions apart

Most budgeting solutions out there have similar problems. Many still require your teams to put in significant manual work to prepare accurate budgets. Others aren’t truly dedicated to budgeting, meaning you have to create an ad-hoc workflow to make them work for you. Even the more advanced budgeting options falter at some other point in your finance processes, turning them into a walled garden that’s great for budgeting but not much else.

Prophix One, a Financial Performance Platform, marries the depth of a dedicated budgeting solution with the breadth of a financial performance management platform. That’s why Prophix One users:

• Save weeks or months by automating their budget cycle.
• Have more trust in the accuracy of their budgets and reports.
• Get more done by making their operations more efficient.
• Increase the value of the software they’re already using by integrating it rather than replacing it.

Here’s how Prophix One can completely transform your budgeting process.

Prophix’s solutions to common challenges in budgeting

Budgeting season is difficult, time-consuming, and comes with challenges every finance team is familiar with. That’s why Prophix One was built to be the single platform that provides a solution to each of your budgeting roadblocks.

Let’s dive into each solution in more detail.

Inefficiency with spreadsheets

Most finance teams still use spreadsheets for the bulk of their budgeting and planning processes, despite their issues. For one, they’re mostly manual; even the spreadsheet expert in your team often has to clean or analyze data manually. Many of these spreadsheets also have multiple functions and formulas that break all too easily when going from department to department.

Additionally, few teams use a single spreadsheet for the work involved in preparing budgets. That means someone usually has to consolidate data from multiple spreadsheets to get a final budget.

Solution: Reporting

Prophix One’s reporting and financial analytics allow you to instantly pull the data you need for your budgets and build those budgets in the same place without relying on spreadsheets. Get personalized dashboards representing crucial trends, optimize your reporting cycle, and build your budgets in minutes instead of weeks.

Data accuracy and integrity issues

Inaccurate data is the plague of budgeting season. When you can’t get a handle on exactly how much each team spent in a specific period, budgeting becomes a guessing game. With essential data coming from multiple sources, each with its own methodology, everything must be processed and validated before being loaded into your budgeting solution. And, sometimes, despite all the checks and balances, you’ll still run into inaccuracies.

Solution: Automation and audit logs

In a world with self-driving cars and smartphones, no one should be manually crunching data to build budgets. Use automation to move data between teams, budgets, and forecasts seamlessly so it’s always at your fingertips. Audit logs also allow you to verify your numbers when needed—and help ensure compliance.

Time-consuming approval processes

Putting budgets together can be time-intensive and its often approvals that push this process over the deadline. Several leaders might need to add their perspective, often after reviewing all the data your team put together. Questions about a single expense can send the whole process into a tailspin as the team scrambles to find the source of that data, validate it, and come up with answers.

Solution: Ad-hoc analysis

With Prophix One any leader has the power to get the answers to their budgeting questions. Ad-hoc analysis gives them self-serve dashboards that source data automatically to give them the bird’s-eye view they need to understand broader trends or dive deeper into the numbers.

Limited real-time collaboration

For most teams, budgeting season involves long nights of closing the shutters, locking the door, and powering through dozens of spreadsheets to go from an ocean of data to a finalized budget. There’s some collaboration at play, though it’s mostly limited to sending files back and forth and chasing down missing data. That collaboration rarely happens in real-time, unless everyone’s in frequent, lengthy meetings.

Solution: Workflows

Prophix One Workflow automates repetitive work and brings your team together to collaborate on the tasks that actually need human input without adding more meetings to their calendars. Your teams can spend more time analyzing insights and building their budgeting strategy together.

How Prophix customers overcome these challenges

Thousands of companies around the world use Prophix One to automate, streamline, and elevate their budgeting processes. Among them are:

• Encore Electric, who saves 1,800 hours a year by automating their budget cycle.
• Bethel University, who cut their budgeting time in half, from 90 hours a week to 45, even during peak budgeting season.
• Health Connect America, whose budgeting improvements add up to $79,380 in annual labor savings.
• SoundOff Signal, who increased the accuracy of its expense budgets by 32%.

Want to see how they did it?

Join next-gen finance teams doing something about their budgeting challenges

You don’t have to be part of the dissatisfied majority anymore. Better budgeting processes are achievable, and you can give your team a platform that saves them time and headaches.