Overview

Realise the benefits of a fully integrated budgeting and planning solution designed to help organisations create and execute accurate, realistic budgets.

Microsoft Forecaster in Microsoft Dynamics GP provides your people with immediate control of the entire budgeting and planning process, helping ensure that you meet yearly business goals efficiently and cost-effectively.

Forecaster Factsheet

Increase collaboration
New users can start working quickly with an application that works like one they use every day - Microsoft Office Excel. The collaborative capabilities help save time and improve the quality and accuracy of the final budget. Features such as automatic e-mail notification can help your people work together more effectively and because your entire organisation can access notification guidelines from a centralised location, there’s little training involved.

Additional customisable Workflow features help the Budget Administrator keep budget contributors on track. So business managers can gain quick access to how their teams are progressing with budget goals. Predefined security assignments and routings safeguard your data. This helps to ensure that sensitive information is provided only to those authorised to view it.

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Through the use of supplemental memos and line item detail, managers can understand the rationale behind important numbers and assumptions made by other department managers. Such understanding helps reduce time spent in meetings. Department managers can interact with each other to help ensure their budgets complement one another.

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Automate data summary
The Rollups feature helps you reorganise your company’s chart of accounts more efficiently. View the parent-child relationships within your data that control how your posting data is summarised and create Rollups for accounts, cost centers, or whatever accounting entities you choose. Just define your Rollups by using the intuitive drag-and-drop interface, and then run a simple Restate function to consolidate your data.

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Increase confidence in your data
Help reduce duplicate entries and the potential for error. Microsoft Forecaster helps managers readily make changes to their cost centres. They can enter data directly into accounts, or use copy/grow functions, calculated accounts, or spreadback methods. Microsoft Forecaster helps improve numeric accuracy and provide immediate access to reports based on those numbers. If any problems arise or adjustments are required, changes can be made immediately. By entering a change based on numbers or percentages, budget administrators can make an adjustment that ripples through the entire plan. As a result, budgets can be completed quickly, which allows you to create more versions, if necessary.

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Budget and control expenses more effectively
By accessing up-to-date and historical information from your organisation’s general ledger and financial reports, you can budget and plan with accuracy. This helps managers and budget analysts save valuable time. Your organisation can shorten its budget time cycle, reduce printing and mailing costs, and create valid, accurate budgets that tie directly to your strategic plans, helping you reach business goals.

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Keep business performance on target
Microsoft Forecaster helps organisations meet their goals by streamlining many of the tasks that comprise the budgeting process. Create individual budgets. Change the budget model. Consolidate budgets and collaborate with interrelated departments. This streamlining of tasks helps give you more time to construct a thoughtful budget that is based on valid data and assumptions. So your budget is more predictive of the future. As a result, you can provide a higher quality budget with goals that are realistic and more achievable.

Features

Flexible Data Analysis and Reports
View and analyse reports and budgets from anywhere in the world in a fully integrated environment.

Comprehensive Account Balances
Use Human Resource Management, Capital Expenditures, and Revenue Planning capabilities to complete detailed planning of account balances for major aspects of your business.

Extensive Human Resources and Benefits Budgeting Options
Budget employee assets in multiple scenarios by adding more detailed budgeting data for specific personnel, with salary planning worksheets and flexible salary and bonus designations.

Detailed Capital Expense Budgets
Manage both the expense and depreciation of planned capital purchases with ease when going through the budget process for your business models.

Dynamic Revenue Forecasting
Maintain control over your revenue forecasting process by making adjustments at any time to accommodate budgetary and planning changes.

Comprehensive Planning Control
Use flexible input screens to define different periods from multiple time periods and create calculated columns such as variances between plans.
Design templates to deliver the relevant information to the right people in the organisation.

Drag-and-Drop Consolidations
View your business from the top down with easy-to-manipulate scenarios and high-level views that enable you to quickly see the impact of the changes on the planning process.

Simplified Import
Extend your current financial data and match how you organise budgeting information and processes, using ExpressLink to flexibly map the General Ledger chart of accounts to Microsoft Forecaster segments. For non-General Ledger data, import functionality helps users more quickly import information by providing the ability to budget and plan beyond General Ledger information.

Workflow Control
Understand your budget status at any time by coordinating the planning process with workflow features and automated e-mail notifications to alert users of pending deadlines.

Streamlined Reporting
Quickly modify Microsoft FRx reports by adding your Microsoft Forecaster accounts and book codes. During the budgeting process, utilise Microsoft Forecaster reports to immediately understand the impact of changes.

Benefits

Quickly adjust to new opportunities.
Advanced capabilities show you exactly where you are in your budgeting process and help you forecast for the future. Microsoft Forecaster enables you to coordinate plans dynamically and collaborate easily with your management team.

Better understand staffing needs.
Make informed staffing decisions by accessing human resources planning details that can be customised, viewed, and analysed in a variety of ways.

Plan more effectively.
Create accurate, high-level plans instantly by automatically spreading increases and decreases across each of your planning periods, using accurate, up-to-date data pulled directly from the General Ledger in Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Streamline your planning.
Smooth integration across Microsoft FRx, Microsoft Forecaster, and Microsoft Dynamics GP enables you to drill down smoothly from summaries to transactions.