Planning and budgeting are critical activities for any business. They help leadership teams align on financial goals, allocate resources effectively, and measure performance over time. However, planning and budgeting can become extremely complex, especially for larger organizations or those with complex business models.
This is where NetSuite Planning and Budgeting comes in. NetSuite Planning and Budgeting is a cloud-based planning and budgeting solution designed specifically for NetSuite ERP users. It enables finance teams to automate and simplify their planning and budgeting processes, gaining efficiency, accuracy and insights.
In this blog post, we’ll explore key capabilities of NetSuite Planning and Budgeting and why businesses are adopting this solution.
Key Features and Benefits
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting brings several major benefits:
Automated Processes
The software automates the collection, analysis and reporting of budget data across the organizations. Finance teams spend less time manipulating spreadsheets and maintaining systems. Planning cycles are reduced from months to weeks or days.
Unified Platform
With NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, budgeting, planning and forecasting all happen in one place, on one unified platform, ensuring continuity across the process. There’s no need to reconcile multiple data sources.
Flexible and Adaptable
Users can tailor budget templates, customizing account segments and adding new accounts or departments. The flexible solution adapts as business needs change.
Driver-Based Modeling
Sophisticated modeling capabilities enable users to build dynamic plans and budgets based on key operational drivers — for example, tying revenue budgets to predicted unit or volume sales.
Continuous Forecasting
In addition to annual budgeting, the software enables rolling forecasts at any periodicity — monthly, quarterly, etc. This supports more accurate visibility into financial performance as conditions change.
Powerful Reporting
Robust reporting functionalities allow users to easily create customized reports and visualizations for sharing insights across the business.
Why Businesses Choose NetSuite Planning and Budgeting?
Organizations select NetSuite Planning and Budgeting over spreadsheets or other solutions for several reasons:
1. Scalability
Spreadsheets become complex, fragmented and difficult to control across large enterprises or global business units. NetSuite Planning and Budgeting scales seamlessly across the organization.
2. Real-Time Insights
With spreadsheets, data often sits in siloes, leaving decision-makers without real-time visibility. NetSuite Planning and Budgeting centralizes information for continuous insights.
3. Collaboration Across Departments
Different departments often operate in siloes during budgeting today. NetSuite Planning and Budgeting brings together cross-functional teams for alignment.
4. ‘Single Source of Truth’
By unifying planning and transactional data in one cloud-based platform, NetSuite Planning and Budgeting delivers one reliable “single source of truth.”
5. Strategic Focus
Automating mundane tasks allows finance leaders to shift focus from “number crunching” to more impactful strategic planning and analysis.
These benefits explain why an increasing number of businesses — from fast-growing startups to Fortune 500 corporations — are selecting NetSuite over conventional budgeting approaches.
Key Capabilities and Features
Now that we’ve covered the major benefits, let’s explore key capabilities and features of NetSuite Planning and Budgeting in more detail:
Financial Statement Planning
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting simplifies financial statement planning, enabling users to easily build integrated Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow plans. Users simply define rows and columns to fit their chart of accounts.
Driver-Based Planning
The software applies a driver-based methodology for dynamic planning, where outcomes are based on key input metrics or “operational drivers.” For example, revenue projections might be driven by predicted unit sales or average selling prices. This models how the business works in reality.
Workforce Planning
For organizations with substantial workforce costs, NetSuite Planning and Budgeting provides dedicated templates. Users can define headcount, salaries, benefits and other employee expenses within their financial plans.
Capital Planning
The solution equips users to easily incorporate capital spending plans — from facilities to IT infrastructure — into their overall company budget and planning process.
Continuous Forecasting
In addition to annual planning, users can build rolling quarterly or monthly forecasts to see how their budgets measure up against actual business volume and trends as conditions evolve.
Modeling and “What If” Analysis
With flexible modeling capabilities, finance teams can easily assess the potential impact of different scenarios on budgets and forecasts — by changing inputs like sales volumes, price points or labor costs.
Reporting and Analytics
Robust reporting functionality allows users to create customized reports with charts, graphs and visualizations to provide insights to stakeholders across the business.
Integration with NetSuite ERP
A key benefit is how NetSuite Planning and Budgeting integrates with NetSuite’s unified cloud ERP platform. This enables a “single source of truth” for both budget planning and transactional data across the core system of record.
These solution capabilities illustrate the comprehensiveness of NetSuite Planning and Budgeting for managing end-to-end financial planning across the enterprise. The software equips finance teams with extraordinary flexibility to tailor the solution to their budgeting needs as business scales and strategies evolve.
Why Choose SuiteRep for NetSuite Implementation?
While NetSuite Planning and Budgeting delivers transformative value, realizing the full benefits requires experience deploying, configuring and adopting this technology across complex organizations.
As a top NetSuite partner, SuiteRep brings specialized expertise implementing NetSuite Planning and Budgeting to achieve rapid time-to-value. Here are key reasons to choose SuiteRep:
Proven Methodology and Experience
Years exclusively implementing NetSuite, SuiteRep follows a proven 7-stage methodology for deploying cloud financial solutions tailored to each client’s needs and strategies.
Industry Expertise
SuiteRep’s dedicated industry teams enable them to configure financial planning solutions to meet the unique needs across software, services, distribution, manufacturing and non-profit sectors.
Hands-On Change Management
Beyond technical implementation, SuiteRep helps clients drive organizational change management for rapid user adoption and lasting value from new processes.
Ongoing Support
SuiteRep provides support for platform upgrades, new feature enhancements and optimizations so clients continuously improve with the latest NetSuite capabilities.
As finance leaders seek ways to make planning and budgeting more agile and insights-driven, NetSuite Planning and Budgeting is emerging as an invaluable platform. With specialized expertise across industries, SuiteRep can help accelerate and de-risk implementation of this solution.
To learn more about deploying NetSuite financial solutions tailored for your organization, contact the experts at SuiteRep today.