How to Improve NetSuite Financial Planning

ARTICLE — The recession has thrust NetSuite financial planning to the top of the CFO agenda.

CFOs fear that the pandemic may trigger a longer-term recession, new research from Deloitte finds.

As things stand, the typical CFO expects their business to achieve just 74 percent of their originally budgeted 2020 revenue, per Deloitte. Only 37 percent of CFOs expect to achieve 95 or more of their originally budgeted revenue. Things are especially bleak in the eyes of CFOs for retail, wholesale, and manufacturing firms, where only one-in-five CFOs expect to come close to budgeted revenues.

Revenue shortfalls have CFOs looking for ways to better manage cash and liquidity. Two-thirds of CFOs surveyed by Deloitte have raised or accessed additional cash. In most businesses, that money is going to fund cash reserves. But some CFOs are using the cash their business raised to fund operations, acquisitions, and projects that were planned before the onset of the pandemic.

Raising cash is not the only strategy that CFOs should consider during these tough times.

Another way to improve financial planning and operational resilience in tough times is to deploy an automated budgetary control solution for NetSuite. A budgetary control solution integrates with NetSuite business processes to extend procurement and provide more granular budget information.

The technology extends NetSuite to control spending at the transaction level against budgets in real-time. Budgetary control solutions check budget availability prior to vendor obligation, provide visibility into potential actuals in the procurement pipeline, streamline the reconciliation of budget versus actual reports and procurement data, and deliver visibility into budgets across the enterprise.

Better control and visibility overspending are critical to improving NetSuite financial planning:

• Procurement governance best practices are automatically enforced
• The budget ledger is instantly updated each time a transaction is modified
• Reporting is more accurate and timelier
• There is less chance that the business will miss expenditure forecasts
• Real-time spend insights to drive decision-making
• Spend-related regulatory compliance is less burdensome
• There is less chance of financial surprises that can drain cash reserves

With a budgetary control solution, CFOs always know where the business’ spending stands. That visibility and control help CFOs make better informed financial plans and forecasts, even when revenue growth is stalled, and market conditions are changing fast. This is visibility and control that a business cannot get from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application on its own.

While any business or non-profit organization can benefit from stronger NetSuite financial planning, automated budgetary control solutions offer an especially compelling business case for those that manage large projects, run OpEx budgets monthly with rollover, amortize numerous expenses throughout the year, or are looking to better govern expenses to drive bottom-line profitability.

If your organization wants to improve its NetSuite financial planning, a budgetary control solution may be for you. Want to learn more? Click here to arrange an online demo of our solution.