6 Budgeting Pain Points that Keep Management Up at Night (and How to Solve Them)

Striving for growth brings its own stressors. Managing today’s challenges while anticipating tomorrow’s market changes draws immense pressure to all levels of management. Technology, including budgeting and reporting software, enables daily operational efficiency, business growth and innovation. Below are our 6 pain points that management experiences and how budgeting technology can solve them.

Pain point #1. Executing growth plans

Growth plans involves transformation in your staff, your business processes and your technology. When one of those factors are slow to change, growth is more difficult to achieve. Agility is a major component of executing plans that puts your company on the road to growth.

Solution:  Use technology that enables agility among your staff and business processes. Outdated, cumbersome budgeting and reporting software drags down business agility required to strive towards proactive innovation to future-proof your company in an ever-changing market.

Pain point #2. Having to do more with less

The CFO’s role is expanding beyond financial activities and ensuring compliance. Likewise, the entire finance team are facing leaner resources, but increased pressure to add value and take on more of a business partnering role within the organization. CIOs are experiencing slimmer budgets, but with a higher number of mandates and are facing a technological landscape that changes faster than before. Operations management are not only needing to do their jobs as quickly and efficiently as possible, but also need to adapt to changing business models.

Solution: Embrace what technology can do to help you get things done faster and with less effort.  How do you get all of this done with fewer resources? Leveraging automation and other disruptive technologies can help your staff do more with fewer resources.

Pain point #3. Conquering cash flow

Poor cash flow management can lead your organization to failure. Lack of control over cash flow management can lead to increased interest and bank charges, deteriorating relationships with vendors and customers, hindered growth, as well as other consequences. While cash management may be top of mind for management, there may be a disconnect among the rest of the staff.

Solution: Tap into the power of complete operational and financial visibility from a fully integrated database. A comprehensive view of your department’s processes and productivity helps you catch cash flow problems before they happen.

Pain point #4. Communicating to internal and external audiences

If it takes almost a herculean effort to pull your reports, creating presentations to stakeholders becomes a stressful endeavor. Communicating complex financial analytics to internal and external stakeholders who come from a non-financial background presents a unique challenge.

Solution: Create visual reports based on advanced analytics to effectively communicate trends and historic data. Telling your story through visuals makes it easier for all your stakeholders to understand, regardless of their background.

Pain point #5: Attracting and retaining talent

Current employees often feel overwhelmed with the amount of time they spend on inefficient methods to do their jobs. When employees are spending excessive time to complete their perfunctory responsibilities, time is taken away from activities that would more effectively elevate their contribution to their team. Instead of manually checking formulas on Excel spreadsheets, they could spend their time upgrading their skills to meet a more technologically demanding marketplace.

Solution: Use cloud-based financial software to improve workflow, enhance process efficiency increase employee engagement. More effective technology enables your staff to focus on what’s important and to spend time bringing their skills up to date to face tomorrow’s challenges.

Pain Point #6: Leading digital transformation

Implementing a future that is built on cutting edge, disruptive technology isn’t easy, but essential for the survival of your business in an increasingly technologically advanced world. Digital transformation isn’t just about installing new equipment or software, though new technology is at the heart of this change. Digital transformation involves a mind-shift for your whole company, training your employees with new skills, implementing cyber-security practices to keep all your data secure and a myriad of other considerations.

Solution: Build a holistic road map for digital transformation but focus on implementing one thing at a time. For example, before upgrading or migrating to a completely new ERP, you may want to deploy an add-on finance module to enhance your efficiency while you vet your new ERP.

To learn more about the budgeting functions in D365 and to get your questions answered in a live format, register now for our webinar on December 17.