Which Software Should Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Choose for Planning and Budgeting Automation?

Businesses encounter several issues: increasing complexity in management structures, growing data volumes, more participants in business processes, and the need to generate management reports. At the same time, the scale of these business processes may not yet justify the integration of comprehensive financial analysis software, as it can be costly, complex, and unnecessary at this stage.

Therefore, let's explore the available options on the market, along with their features and limitations.

For example, there are affordable solutions that help organize data and financial reporting. These come with benefits like ease of self-implementation, user-friendly interfaces, and pre-configured reporting templates.

However, these solutions also have limitations that can significantly restrict the finance department's work. The pre-configured templates are generic and may not suit the specific needs of a particular business that requires consideration of many unique factors.

Additionally, the analytical capabilities of these programs can be very limited: they often lack forecasting tools, advanced plan-versus-actual analysis is available only in premium tiers, and there is no functionality for scenario planning or financial modeling.

An alternative is a comprehensive business planning and budgeting system, but this also has its own challenges. The cost of such solutions is significantly higher because they are designed for large data flows and extensive analytics. The advantages include flexible systems for creating management reports that truly address business questions, a wide range of analytical tools, and robust multi-level security.

Despite these benefits, small and medium-sized businesses often hesitate to adopt such systems. The main reason is that implementing these systems often requires consultant involvement. While the system itself might be straightforward and user-friendly, additional expertise is usually needed to properly set up the business process architecture within the system.

Experts often recommend intermediate solutions, such as Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) systems, as a viable alternative.

These systems are suitable for gradually scaling business processes because they offer flexibility, high analytical capabilities, a broad set of analytical tools, and are reasonably priced.

Such systems allow for configuring according to the necessary data volumes and reporting forms. For example, a business could start with a small automation project for a single report and gradually expand the scope to include more corporate processes.