ExcluServ have extensive experience in streamlining the budgeting processes of small to large charities using a variety of approaches and technical solutions to suit the complexity, size and budget of each charity.

We can do a quick, free analysis of your current budgeting, forecasting and planning process and suggest solutions that will solve the challenges that your charity face.

Of course budgeting and planning is not all about the tools. ExcluServ’s directors are CIMA qualified accountants, who have all coached budget holders in the charity sector, running courses on how to plan, forecast, budget and make best use of the management reports they receive. Typically this will also be part of any work we deliver with a client, or we can provide training on your current systems to your finance team or wider users

Streamlining your Excel Solution:

Most small to medium charities use Excel spreadsheets to do their annual budget. This is a very effective way for a small charity to formalise the process, and in many cases is what we will introduce.

However, where these have been developed in-house, they normally begin to display a whole variety of problems over time, including:

• Difficulty distributing centralised data
• Formulas which are broken or overwritten
• Inconsistencies between spreadsheets
• Problems with data integrity across the budgeting process
• Problems maintaining links between different sheets
• Consolidation of data can be very time consuming

ExcluServ will typically eliminate these problems by making use of standard Excel functionality to make the spreadsheets more robust, and applying VBA scripts to add features. Typically this can cut weeks from your budgeting, forecasting and planning process by reducing distribution and consolidation time whilst eliminating user error.

Upgrading your Excel Solution – MS SQL Server:

Larger charities’ budgeting, forecasting and planning requirements become more sophisticated than what can be easily managed by a combination of Excel and VBA alone. These typically include:

• More budget holders and cost centres
• Real time collation of budget information without a consolidation process
• Easily distribute and change centralised budget information and assumptions to budget holders during the budget process
• Reporting using existing MS SQL Server based reporting tools such as Reporting Services, Crystal Reports and Jet Reports
• Integration of budget data with other data sources

ExcluServ are experts in transforming your current Excel based budgeting process into a process using MS SQL Server as the database driving the application. Typically the user interface can remain in Excel, and just requires minor changes. This makes it easy for end users to adopt the new approach whilst benefiting from all the advantages the database back end brings.

Budgeting and Forecasting in the Cloud (Adaptive Planning):

For some charities a combination of Excel, VBA and SQL does not make business sense and organisations are best suited to look for an enterprise level budgeting, forecasting and planning tool.

An enterprise standard budgeting, forecasting and planning solution is typically suited where you are in need of:

• One application for budgeting, forecasting and management reporting
• Complicated roll-up of budget data across the charity
• What-if analysis and multiple versions of the same budget
• Interactive dashboards
• Workflow authorisation
• Complete protection against user error, with varied levels of user permissions
• Integration with your accounting system for actual figures and drilldown to transactional level data
• Extensive customisation of your budgeting process without the need of technical support and development

ExlcuServ have compared many of the enterprise solutions on the market today. We compared functionality, cost and adoptability of a wide variety of budgeting, forecasting and planning tools. As a result we identified Adaptive Planning as highly flexible and cost effective solution. Since then we become qualified implementation partners of Adaptive Planning, and are their channel to the UK Not for Profit sector.

ExcluServ can offer organisations a fully working demonstration model, set up to your charity’s individual requirements. This can be done at no initial cost and no risk.

Read more on why we chose Adaptive Planning, the implementation process and pricing models.