Budgeting & Forecasting
Now you can use Coda Financials as the springboard for a quicker and easier budget cycle.
We’ve combined the flexibility of our financial model with the familiarity and convenience of Microsoft® Excel®, to streamline the seeding, preparation, manipulation, and production of budgets. The end result is unparalleled analysis, delivered in a format and tool every business can understand.
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Create a financial model inside your finance system
Most General Ledger systems can store relatively simplistic account-level budgets. Others are limited by the flexibility of the chart of accounts or rigid “code blocks” offered within the system. Chart inflexibility limits the ability to budget at more detailed and operational levels.
Coda Financials goes far beyond the traditional view of budgeting by allowing users to create a financial model of their business inside their finance system. This begins with the ability to track actuals and budgets against an unlimited array of account coding schemes. For instance, the Coda chart of accounts can accommodate completely different account coding schemes within the same company. This allows each line of business to measure profitability and budget performance the way it needs to, yet provides a single reporting model or ledger – that is always in balance. In the Coda financial model, budgets can follow a typical profit and loss format, mirror your operational structure, or provide deep product analysis – the only limit is your imagination.
Budget granularity provides more insights
Once the chart of accounts is in place, budgets can be established at all different levels of your chart of accounts, including combinations of accounts. For instance, suppose you manage the Chicago store of Appleton Supermarkets, a national food retailer. You might book chocolate sales against this simple three level account combination: Sales.Chicago.Chocolate.
In this example, budgets can be established at many different combination levels:
- Sales
- Sales.Chicago
- Sales.Chicago.Chocolate
- Sales.Chocolate
- Chicago.Chocolate
- Chicago
- Chocolate
These budget dimensions can also include iterations for currencies, budget revisions and forecasts. To summarise, this granular budgeting ability allows you to set up more precise business metrics to accurately measure your corporate performance.
Budget by Project, Customer, Supplier, Asset… …you name it!
Because Coda Financials is designed as a single ledger without separate Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Project Accounting and Fixed Asset subsystems, full budgeting capabilities are available across all functions of the application. This means you can establish budgets for customers, customer locations, suppliers, supplier locations, supplier products, employees, project, task, subtask, asset, asset locations etc. The possibilities are endless.
Statistics tell the story
Management reporting and budgeting is not always just about the financial numbers. Statistical values have become increasingly important for budgeting and reporting purposes. At some companies, statistics are added into spreadsheets – after the fact and outside the financial system – leading to data integrity and “single version of the truth” issues.
With Coda Financials, you can capture and store statistical information at both the document-line level and at the summarised-balance level within the financial model. Typical examples include staff hours, gallons, pounds, miles, units sold etc. These statistical summaries or balances can also carry budgets. You can use both the actual and budgeted quantity values to derive new budgets, perform allocations and produce operational reports such as: average cost per gallon, average unit sales, average revenue per hour, unit sales vs. budget etc. Users can store and control statistical values centrally, while enriching management reports, allocations and budget analysis consistently across the enterprise.
Budget preparation and reporting with Microsoft® Excel®
Microsoft® Excel® is the desktop tool of choice for most financial managers, particularly when it comes to budgeting and financial analysis. Coda Financials bridges the gap between your financial system and Excel® with our dedicated Coda XL application.
Coda XL is a user-friendly tool that combines the power and control of Coda with the familiarity and convenience of Microsoft® Excel® – enabling you to output, work with, display and even input your budget data more easily from inside Excel®. It harnesses the advantages of spreadsheets but overcomes their usual weaknesses and complexities.
Coda XL can feed your budget preparation worksheets with real-time data and makes it easier for you to securely push back your results into the Coda financial model, where your new budgets can be used for reporting companywide.
To help get you started, Coda XL is delivered with a template budget loader. The budget loader allows users to download current balances and budgets, extrapolate new budgets for the upcoming year, and then upload the new budgets into the Coda Financials model – all within the budget loader worksheet template. This can eliminate extra steps on every budget iteration you incur, i.e.:-
- the need to run a report to download values into an Excel formatted file and
- the need to learn a separate and often cumbersome import tool; everything is done inside Excel®.
Coda XL helps remove the drudgery of recurring budget cycles and revision iterations. And better yet, Coda XL is designed for Excel®-savvy users and doesn’t require IT support.
