Budgeting for Professional Services Dynamics AX Users

Modern budgeting and forecasting tools can help Professional Services organizations streamline, modernize and expand their Dynamics AX planning processes.    

Budgeting is typically a challenge no matter your industry, but thankfully it is becoming more user friendly and intuitive because of modern tools to expand your Microsoft Dynamics AX processes.  Planning is just as vital for professional services organizations, but there are industry-specific focuses and objectives, which is true for most sectors in terms of budgeting needs.  A majority of corporations are still employing Excel for manual budgeting processes, but today’s planning demands are more complex than what the spreadsheet program can offer.  If you’re shopping for an independent software vendor (ISV) budgeting solution that empowers you to query historical actuals from Dynamics AX in addition to payroll and various organization- and/or industry-specific data sources for a consolidated financial strategy that comes together through teamwork, then this article is for you.

Planning typically involves a number of professionals looking at historical figures and doing some research to achieve projections to design a budget for the next fiscal year.  Excel has been the global go-to program for finance and accounting departments over the past couple of decades, but manually piecing together spreadsheets is usually quite messy in terms of logistics and security.  Because Excel is still such a popular tool, an ISV solution might seem like an avoidable extra cost.  That said, there are plenty of benefits that can upgrade your Dynamics AX planning tasks, perhaps particularly for Professional Services teams.

ISV solutions have steadily become more popular because of their ease of use, flexible access, and emphasis on collaboration.  Excel add-in tools are prevalent because they take the familiar program and upgrade the output through dynamic feature and functionality additions associated with a ribbon on the toolbar in Excel, enabling users to get away from manually built, separate spreadsheets.  The best third party solutions offer built-in accounting logic, automation, and templates you can reuse, so your Professional Services team can more easily manage data.

Business professionals have sensibly been skeptical about security and ease of use with any planning tool due to your investments of time, money, and energy.  Today, passwords and access rights enable teamwork in secure, efficient ways, so supervisors can truly own the budgets that they have to manage throughout the year.  You can do away with back-and-forth, heavily attached email conversations.  The budget manager can then facilitate a comprehensive and inclusive planning process that involves team members from all areas of the organization.  And it’s not too good to be true, especially when you look at the potential return on your investment.

To continue learning more about budgeting for Professional Services organizations using Microsoft Dynamics AX, read the rest of this article here.

by Solver, Inchttp://www.solverusa.com