Government

Five reasons you need to invest in budget planning software

Questica icon

Questica

Annual reviews can be draining when you don’t have the right tools in place to make your job easier. Not only does the annual budget process tend to take days and multiple people and departments to complete, but the monthly and daily tasks of tracking spending and expenses across the organization is another opportunity for a necessary job to become burdensome. Budget planning software can solve both, and many more, quandaries that arise when managing a city, county, agency or state’s finances. If you haven’t yet explored budget planning software and its many tools that will both streamline your budgeting and forecasting, as well as help you make better decisions, here’s a glimpse of some great things it can do for you.

 

1. Simplicity
Excel spreadsheets can be great tools, but they are antiquated and make keeping documents up to date across departments and management structures more challenging than they ought to be. With the right budget planning software, automated steps in the process will simplify not only how you enter and keep track of data, but also how you share universal documents throughout the company.

 

2. Accuracy
Whether it’s making sure your rollups are right the first time, or dealing with changes to funding within your budget, automated budget planning software will leave a lot of these tricky numbers to the algorithms that can’t get them wrong. With budget planning software you greatly decrease the opportunity for human error, meaning your cost and expense tracking can always be up-to-date with very little effort on your end. Greater accuracy also means greater cost savings.

 

3. Time saving
There’s no need to mess with resetting your forecasts each month, or spending hours each month and year to balance the numbers and see where you landed in comparison to your goals. With budget planning software, you will undoubtedly save time on mindless data entry tasks, so that you’ll be able to put time into using your collected data to use in planning for your future.

 

4. Big data mining
What some local governments don’t have time to consider is the fact that their annual numbers are actually big datasets waiting to be mined, shared and put to use in helping the city achieve its goals and better serve its communities. Whether it’s a new project you want to plan, infrastructure investment you’re considering, or maybe a new service, don’t let those numbers you’ve been faithful to collect go to waste.

 

5. Visualize your numbers
Spreadsheets, and even automated templates like those found in budget planning software can only go so far in giving you helpful insights into your city’s financial health. Many people digest numbers with greater weight when they see them represented in visualizations like graphs. Data visualizations will also help you tell your story to story to your citizens and businesses.

 

Don’t let antiquated spreadsheets hold you back. Empower your managers to take stock in your city’s fiscal affairs by investing in budget planning software that is centralized organization-wide, helping everyone to make better business decisions. For more information about Questica’s government budgeting solutions, contact us for a demo today!

LinkedInTwitterEmailPrint