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Budgeting Software Buyer's Guide
Table of Contents
- What is Budgeting Software?
- How does Budgeting Software work?
- Is it worth investing money in Budgeting Software?
- What are the features of Business Budgeting Software?
- What are the benefits of Budgeting Software?
- What are the key buying factors to be considered before choosing business Budgeting software?
- How to choose a Good Budgeting Software?
- Pricing of the Business Budgeting Software
- Conclusion
Financial budgeting is one of the most important tools that steer a business irrespective of the nature of the industry that it operates in or its size. Without knowing the financial means that a business has at its disposal, it is difficult to know the available capital, the amount of expenditure that you can safely make, the revenue that you may earn in the future, and setting your goals and priorities. Therefore, it is critical to have sound budgetary planning imbibed into your strategic business plan. It involves making a near to accurate estimate of your revenues vis-à-vis anticipated expenses. Businesses cannot afford to make any errors in financial projections, forecasts, and expenses. This is why technology and the use of budgeting software have become so important in business budgeting. It minimizes problems like human errors and loss of data and ensures accuracy and real-time monitoring and forecasts.
What is Budgeting Software?
Budget software or financial software is that software which is designed to digitize or automate the financial information and planning of a business. It is able to efficiently track accounts, pay the company’s bills online, bifurcate income and expenses, and make your credit card payments. The best budgeting software has inbuilt monitoring, tracking, and analysis capabilities to intelligently analyze your financial data and provide reports about your financial status.
Financial Software is of two types- financial management software (also known as money management software) and tax software. Money management software helps a business manage its banking operations, investing and planning decisions, etc. Tax software helps a business in its overall tax management and filing of tax returns etc.
How does Budgeting Software work?
Best budgeting software is one of the most important tools that will ensure the financial security and success of your business or your personal financial standing through the best personal finance software. This software gets connected to your business bank account and acts like an automated smart checkbook. In addition to managing your payments and paying your bills, it also uses analytics and insights to help you plan better in terms of your finances. Budgeting software, after importing all your data, then bifurcates your income and expense sources to let you see where you are earning from and where are the expenses being made. The best personal finance software, on the other hand, categorizes your income and expenses and tells you your personal financial situation. It alerts you when you spend excess money in any particular category.
Is it worth investing money in Budgeting Software?
It is important for businesses to constantly monitor their finances in order to stay afloat and ensure sustained profitability in the long run. Using manual accounting methods to enter your financial data, analyze it, measure, forecast, and analyze takes up a lot of your precious resources of time and money. With multiple people handling this data, it becomes prone to human errors, loss of data, and at times security issues. This is one of the main reasons why it makes perfect sense to invest in business budgeting software.
What are the features of Business Budgeting Software?
Automation of business processes allows companies to simplify and organize their processes. It also allows for better communication and collaboration between the employees. In the long run, it leads to an increase in profits and minimization of costs. Still, many businesses across industries face problems when it comes to automating their financial processes of planning, budgeting, forecasting, analyzing, consolidating, and reporting.
Today, with the advancements in software technologies, there is no dearth of business budgeting software providers. There are thousands of companies providing financial planning software. This often leaves the businesses confused while deciding which software to choose.
The financial planning software that a business will choose will spell out its success or failure financially in the longer run. Therefore, this has to be a very careful decision.
If you are a business and are looking for the best budgeting software to help you with consolidation, budgeting, analysis, and reporting of your financial data, we suggest you look for the following features before making a purchase decision:
› MANAGEMENT OF END-TO-END ACCOUNTING FUNCTIONS OF YOUR BUSINESS: The financial software should be able to automate and digitize all the accounting procedures of your business like accounts payable, accounts receivable, the cash flowing into your business, the expenses that your business incurs, purchases made, ledgers, etc.
› CUSTOMIZABLE: The financial planning software must be customizable with all universal currencies and languages. It should adhere to all the rules, laws, and guidelines of the country of its origin and the country where it is being used. This makes the financial planning software easy to use across the multiple locations of business and amongst multiple departments.
› REPORTING: The financial software should be able to generate reports instantly from the data fed into it. The reports should be easy to visualize and comprehend. The money management software should be able to report both numerically and visually i.e. through graphs and charts for an easy understanding by the users. The reports don’t have to be boring and static documents. They should be interactive, analytical and dynamic.
› INBUILT ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING SYSTEM EXTENSION: The money management software that you choose should basically be an extension of your existing accounting software. If it is not an extension, but a completely different version of your existing accounting system, it will not be able to read and analyze your existing financial data.
› CUSTOMIZABLE DASHBOARD: The dashboard of your financial planning software must be customizable with all the information and data that you need to add to your financial reports. You should be able to add comments, add or remove rows and columns, insert images or logos, etc.
› PLANNING AND FORECASTING: The best budgeting software should be able to predict the future trends and patterns in your income and expenses on the basis of your historical data. This is greatly helpful for an organization to make strategic investment decisions and predict market conditions.
› SECURE AND SEAMLESS: Since the budget software will hold the most critical and confidential financial information pertaining to your business, it should have great security features to prevent unauthorized access to your data and information. The software should not be cumbersome and allow access to all interested parties seamlessly. It should also integrate with your other financial business applications and bank accounts so as to simplify the process and maximize the collaboration.
What are the benefits of Budgeting Software?
To keep up with the competition, businesses today need to be agile and plan for the future. It is critical for the survival of any business to be able to forecast the market trends and patterns and decide the best avenues to invest in. To do all of this, you need a clear picture of where you stand financially i.e. what are your income and expenses. Manual accounting and budgeting processes are not analytical and do not help you in making forecasts.
Therefore, it has become important for every business to start automating their budgeting. We are listing some reasons as to why should you make this switch at the earliest!
› RELIABILITY: Since budget software is automated, the chances of errors are very low. When the data is free from any miscalculations and errors, it helps the budget and forecasts become more accurate and reliable.
› BETTER REPORTING: The manual systems of accounting and budgeting like Excel and Spreadsheets can only consume information. They cannot make forecasts about future trends and patterns in the market. The best budget software uses advanced levels of insights and analysis to predict the future scenarios on the basis of the historical data of the expenses and income of your business.
› BETTER COMPLIANCE: Businesses are governed by complicated laws and regulations not only pertaining to taxes but about their overall functioning. With financial software, it becomes easier to locate and track entries and information in the eventuality of any compliance matter. This financial software makes it easy to predict any discrepancies before they become larger issues.
› ENHANCED PRODUCTIVITY: When your financial accounting is automated, your employees are freed up from doing the mundane tasks of making financial entries manually. Instead, they can spend time on more strategic functions and solving critical business issues.
What are the key buying factors to be considered before choosing business Budgeting software?
The dynamic business environment, cutthroat competition, and advancements in the technology have made it imperative for businesses to invest in automating their budgeting and financial accounting process. By doing this and minimizing human involvement, also minimizes errors and inaccuracies in the budgeting process. However, before a business decides to take the plunge, there are some factors that need to be given consideration. We are listing some points, which you should keep in mind before digitizing your business processes.
› DOES YOUR COMPANY NEED THE BUSINESS BUDGETING SOFTWARE?
Money management software helps businesses of all sizes and nature to become more efficient and productive. Every business has its own unique needs to fulfil from this software. For example, a small business will always look for options to minimize their expenses. While large businesses will be more keen to understand the future market trends and patterns so as to make forecasts and sound business investments. You are the best judge of the stage that your business is in. And if there is any confusion, you should consult experts to help you make a sound decision.
› WHAT ARE YOUR REQUIREMENTS FROM THE SOFTWARE?
As discussed above, every business will have a different need from budget software which ranges from becoming more productive, helping your employees engage and collaborate better, make your data secure, or simply to forecast markets better. It is important to clearly define your requirements and expectations so as to choose the best-suited financial software for your business.
› WHAT IS YOUR BUDGET?
For the first time investors in financial software, it is quite a critical decision. This decision should be made only after a clear understanding of your expectations and requirements from the financial software. You should not look for cheaper options at the cost of compromising the budgeting health and financial security of your business.
How to choose a Good Budgeting Software?
With thousands of software service providers in the market today, it is difficult for businesses to make a choice while choosing the right software. Every software company makes different claims and proclaim their product to be the best. We have listed some factors that should be considered before choosing the financial software for your business.
› USER-FRIENDLY: This is the primary factor to be considered while choosing financial software. It should simplify and not complicate the financial accounting process of your business.
› INTEGRATIVE: The budget software should integrate with your existing business applications. Else, it will disrupt the smooth functioning of your business processes.
› SECURITY: When you use web-based software, you place your critical business data on external servers. How serious is the software service provider about encrypting and safeguarding your data, is a serious factor to consider.
Pricing of the Business Budgeting Software
Business budgeting software is priced depending on the features that they pack in. With so many choices available in the market, it is important to carefully compare the features of various software available and make a sound decision. The price ranges from $9 to $ 80 dollars a month. Some software company’s offer customized pricing i.e. you are required to pay only for the additional features that you use. A good way to assess the potentially suitable software is to use its basic version that available free of cost.
Conclusion
We hope this write-up will help you in making a sound investment while choosing financial software for your business. It surely is a great way to become more productive and efficient in the long run by avoiding wastage of resources and minimizing chances of errors in forecasting the future scenario of your business. In case, you are not able to make a decision, we urge you to refer to software review platforms that give an unbiased and non-commercial viewpoint on various software options available in the market.