How Planning Maestro Helps You

Streamline your budgeting process

Budgeting with spreadsheets is time-consuming and error-prone. Planning Maestro®  eliminates tedious tasks, making budgeting easy. Build a budget model in days. Test multiple scenarios, generate accurate forecasts, and enforce your chart of accounts. Continually refine your budget to meet the challenge of constant change.

Build driver-based budgets quickly

Planning Maestro’s built-in accounting rules and business logic let you build an accurate, driver-based budget quickly and easily. No programming. No formulas. It connects operational activities with business goals, tracking your performance so you can quickly adjust your budget as needed to stay in the green.

Secure, collaborative budgeting

Accurate budgets require input from across the business. Planning Maestro’s role-based access allows stakeholders to contribute to the budget, accessing only the data and functions relevant to them. Built-in safeguards help ensure financial integrity and compliance.

Simplify workforce planning

Quickly build a detailed workforce plan and assess your resources to evaluate your company’s ability to meet its goals. Understand how each department and employee contributes to your bottom line. Built-in logic tracks overtime, premium time, and shift differentials according to your work and pay cycles.

Ongoing revenue planning

Easily create driver-based revenue projections and rolling forecasts to help drive business growth and profitability. See a complete picture of past sales performance and develop attainable forecasts, rolling up all revenue streams into a comprehensive, company-wide view.

Complete Budgeting Resource Center

Download the full resource center to access everything you need to prepare for your next budgeting season.

Budgeting and Planning

Planning Maestro can give you a fully functional driver-based budget model in days—one that’s flexible enough for you to make any change and see the financial impact.

Watch Budgeting Demo

Frequently Asked Questions

Today’s competitive and uncertain business world creates a must-have situation for accurate and agile budgeting software. With budgeting and planning software, your finance team can gain back valuable hours and deliver real-time insights all year long. From tracking expenses to running reports, the right budget software can increase your business’s efficiency and streamline your workflows.

At the bare minimum, cloud budgeting software should include strong reporting capabilities that allow your company to see the big picture and stay agile by generating and managing your financial statements like cash flow reports and profit and loss statements. In addition, some business accounting software can include personnel planning, performance dashboards, forecasting, and scenario planning.

Must-have features of budgeting software include:

  • Integration to the rest of your business
  • Granular expense tracking
  • Custom reporting
  • Top-down budgeting
  • Quick, accurate, and robust planning, budgeting, and reporting
  • Accuracy and compliance
  • Established customer support
  • Cash-flow insights

The main budgeting challenges that businesses face include:

  • Coordination and collaboration: Does your business struggle with multiple versions of the truth? Budgeting requires many moving parts and input from multiple stakeholders. Your business needs to be able to adjust, react, and update in real-time – together.
  • Complexity: Dealing with multiple systems, like CRMs and ERPs, unwieldy formulas, tracking down the latest actuals, and consolidating feedback are some of the everyday challenges for budget owners.
  • Time: Creating a manual budget takes a great amount of time and energy. In addition, when creating a budget manually, by the time you finish, the data is typically irrelevant and outdated.
  • Accuracy: Manual data entry and multiple versions of the truth lead to huge risks to inaccurate data, therefore affecting your planning, reporting and analytics as well.
  • Continuous planning: Budget verses actual variance reporting is vital for companies. By performing “what-if” scenarios, your company can plan for your future growth. Without the proper technology, this task is nearly impossible and you’re forced to rely on last year’s data.