ABOUT QUESTICA BUDGET
Questica’s non-profit advanced budget management software – Questica Budget – is a comprehensive, streamlined solution that will significantly shorten your budget cycles while providing better accuracy and improved insight to the details and assumptions that drive your budget.
BUDGETING AND FORECASTING FEATURES
With our solution, data is consolidated automatically, based on predefined rollup structures. Review consolidated results organization-wide by funds, divisions, departments, locations, projects, grants or any relevant element.
Budget Assumptions
Create revenue and expense budgets based on the parameters that drive your programs. We provide an unlimited number of user defined “driver” accounts to fit the needs of budget or program managers. Driver accounts provide for input based on pertinent assumptions such as clients served, billable days, rate per day, memberships, and indirect cost rates.
Overhead Allocations
We provide simple, wizard driven templates, enabling overhead allocations to be set up in just minutes without the need to work with complex formulas found in other solutions. Allocate administrative costs across departments or programs based on financial elements such as revenues, expenses, or based on driver accounts such as FTE, square footage, or any other user-defined account as your basis. Payroll based accounts such as FTE are integrated with staff budgeting in our system. As you change your staff allocations, the basis for your overhead allocations will also be updated.
Scenario-based Budgeting
We provide an unlimited number of budget scenarios to facilitate performing various ‘what-if’ conditions and analyzing the results of each. Each scenario provides optional settings to support a budget or forecast template while security settings allow further options to hide scenarios by user group. Copy all contents from prior actual data or a previous budget version, use projection tools to define global assumptions, and make budget entries and changes from a bottom up or a top-down approach. Scenarios are tightly controlled in the budgeting and forecasting process through workflow tracking of budget submissions and approvals.
Workflows/Approvals and Audit Trail Functionality
Our audit trail functionality has been designed to log all the changes to the configuration of the Questica environment and track all data related changes. Our system also includes inherent flexible workflow functionality which serves as a collaborative tool and allows everyone involved in the budgeting process to understand and work with the applicable budget stages and transitions.
PERSONNEL BUDGET DEVELOPMENT AND PROJECTIONS
We offer everything you need for personnel budgeting within our software: added efficiency, control the process, and greater support for personnel budgeting.
Payroll Calculations
Utilize Questica’s predefined payroll calculations or add additional calculations modeled to your organization’s unique requirements. An unlimited number of user-defined calculations can be added to the system covering all your compensation, tax, and benefit planning needs.
Rates for each calculation can be applied per employee or globally based on user defined groups:
- Calculate all compensation (including taxes and benefits)
- Plan for open positions and new hires
- Plan for Salary Adjustments
- Allocations
Split employee costs across funds, departments, grants, or funding sources based on percentage allocations or hours. Unlike other systems, our built-in logic ensures that records are 100% allocated. Grant budgeting provides an option to allocate over 100% at the proposal stage, then to true up the records before finalizing the budget. Employee level reports offer an easy review of employee allocations.
Personnel Planning
Questica provides flexibility to apply personnel planning across unlimited budget or forecast scenarios. Build the personnel budget in a defined scenario, copy all contents to a second scenario, and apply rate and staffing changes for a side by side comparison. Adjust rates from a central table for a simple and efficient means of establishing detailed and accurate payroll projections.
Personnel Reporting
View details supporting personnel budgets with our personnel level reporting. Utilize multiple views to validate employee details. Variance reporting at the employee level provides a valuable tool for reviewing employee level variances prior to submitting reports to funding sources.
CAPITAL EXPENDITURES
Budget manager can submit requests in the budgeting process for all their capital needs. The capital expenditure request functionality provides an easy-to-use interface identifying all supporting details for each capital item. Approved requests are finalized into the approved budget and depreciation schedules flow through to the income statement and cash flow reports.
CIP Budgeting/Decision Packages
This comprehensive tool is used to plan for Capital Improvement Projects and other specific budget packages such as Grants, Personnel Additions/Reductions, and Operational Expenses requiring management approvals.
REPORTING AND ANALYSIS
For details about our comprehensive reporting and analysis features, check out the Performance section.
STRUCTURE
Central to an efficient and accurate budget process is maintaining a structured environment and effectively tracking status as budgets are completed.
- Role-based security provides an intuitive framework for defining user access to data throughout the system.
- Security ensures that data is controlled, from the input templates, to personnel and capital budgets, all the way through to reports and analysis.
- Workflow stages provide a central point from which to track budget submissions and status across the organization.
- At a glance, determine budgets that have been submitted and approved, budgets that remain outstanding, and distribute correspondence to budget managers with key information and timelines.
- Drill down further to approval history and notes tied to each budget.
OUR APPROACH
We take incredible pride in delivering an exceptional customer experience for every customer. Our goal is to get you and your organization up and running with little to no disruptions. Throughout the process, we listen, adapt and always uncover ways our tools and technologies can improve our customers outcomes and enhance our future offerings.
Financial Systems Integration
Financials don’t wait for implementation and neither should you. Our solution integrates with the leading non-profit financial, human resources and other systems such as:
Training and Resources
Questica provides full installation documentation with every release, as well as implementation assistance, technical support and online help. We also offer training resources for administrators, to help you deploy Questica Budget in the right ways.