To help businesses in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) drive accurate, connected business plans and be prepared for what’s next, Oracle NetSuite recently announced new updates to NetSuite Planning and Budgeting. The latest updates to this will be able to help businesses in ANZ make data-informed decisions by providing the flexibility to adjust budgets and forecasts.
What are the NetSuite Planning and Budgeting updates?
The latest updates to NetSuite Planning and Budgeting planned for later this year include:
- Version Builder Wizard: Helps businesses effectively and quickly deal with market changes by delivering enhanced scenario planning functionality. This new functionality makes it easier and faster for customers to model a range of budget or forecast scenarios.
By automating all these simulations, it also helps Australian and New Zealand businesses quickly and easily understand the potential impact of different variables. It helps them identify potential opportunities and risks, and enables businesses make faster and smarter decisions.
- Task Manager: Helps businesses define, execute, and report on the interdependent activities of a business process. It provides centralised monitoring of all tasks and provides a visible, automated, repeatable system of record for running a business process.
This enables users to define the tasks and schedule to the most efficient task flow, automate the business process, monitor and track status, and analyse the effectiveness of a process.
What is the utility of NetSuite Planning and Budgeting?
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting is enabling businesses automate labor-intensive planning and budgeting processes so the finance teams can quickly and easily produce budgets and forecasts, model what-if scenarios, and generate reports — all within one collaborative, scalable solution. Businesses are using NetSuite Planning and Budgeting to assist with:
- Budgeting and Forecasting: Helps businesses automate tedious budgeting processes. Budget templates are dynamically populated and updated from NetSuite’s general ledger and can accommodate changes to accounting segments. In addition, forecasts and reforecasts can be created in minutes, while prebuilt workflows make it easy to track the progress of reviews and approvals.
- Scenario Planning: Helps businesses perform scenario modeling and multidimensional planning with any number of NetSuite dimensions, such as location, product, customer, or expense. This simplifies the modelling of complex calculations including projected revenue, operating and capital expenditures, headcount costs, cash flow, and sales without the risk of formula errors posed by regular updates or monthly maintenance.
- Workforce Planning: Helps businesses simplify workforce planning elements such as headcount, salary, and compensation planning by aligning the needs and priorities of a business with those of its workforce. This helps ensure short and long-term objectives are met.
- Rolling Forecasting: Helps businesses account for and adapt to market changes by producing rolling forecasts against a best-practice framework and enabling users to continuously update a plan.
- Reporting: Helps businesses deliver insightful data and analysis to stakeholders by leveraging pre-built executive dashboards, board reporting packages, and budget vs. actual reports. In addition, Smart View, a Microsoft Office Add-In, provides the ability to integrate NetSuite Planning and Budgeting data directly into Excel, PowerPoint, and Word for ad-hoc reporting and analysis.
What are the customer and executive remarks?
Pureprofile, a global data, insights and media organisation providing online research and digital advertising services, serves more than 700 clients in North America, Europe and in the Asia Pacific region. Pureprofile is using NetSuite Planning and Budgeting to manage its increasingly complex financials, run scenario planning, as well as to help accurately forecast.
“With NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, we have increased productivity and forecasting accuracy. It has allowed us to shift our financial planning from being a quarterly process taking weeks at a time to one that we can now run and also watch happen in real time. As a result of this, our leadership team can now make decisions way faster based on real-time information to help our business continue to thrive,” said Hana Abdullah, commercial manager, Pureprofile.
“Many of the challenges in the budgeting and forecasting processes within Australian and New Zealand businesses stem from using the wrong tools for business. Boards and business leaders depend on getting the right numbers. Errors reduce their confidence, and they could lead to several misguided decisions,” said Evan Goldberg, founder and EVP, Oracle NetSuite.
“Right now, accurate financial planning and analysis is critical for business. Spreadsheets cannot support a business properly and quarterly planning is not enough. The new features in NetSuite Planning and Budgeting help businesses in Australia and New Zealand confidently and continuously navigate and also plan for change within one collaborative and scalable solution.”
