Outmaneuvering Tough Times with NetSuite Financial Planning

ARTICLE — It is time for NetSuite customers to rethink financial planning.

As the economic impacts of the global pandemic continue, the time for creating a new approach to financial planning is now. An integrated, end-to-end solution that provides spend management and budget control within NetSuite can connect the variables that drive financial planning. These might include actuals in the procurement pipeline, encumbrance or commitment accounting, CapEx project expenses, OpEx budgets, and expenses that need to be amortized throughout the year.

Many companies have found that annual plans, budgets, and forecasts created pre-COVID-19 are irrelevant, Accenture notes. As a result, many companies withdrew their annual guidance. Even before the pandemic, most NetSuite customers had trouble meeting their expenditure forecasts. To adjust to the new reality, financial planning should shift to real-time, using budgetary control solutions tightly integrated with NetSuite to reflect current variables. Financial planning requires timely, good quality data, drawn from as many sources as possible. Budgetary control solutions leverage procurement data to achieve complete visibility from the point of the purchase requisition. With better spend management and budget control, executive leadership can better determine a path for moving forward, and the business can more accurately report budgeted versus actual expenses.

There are five ways that a budgetary control solution helps businesses get financial planning right:

1. Imports budget data directly from standard NetSuite Budgets or Oracle PBCS.
2. Enforces “budget checking” during procurement when requisitions and POs are created.
3. Encumbers expenses throughout the procurement lifecycle.
4. Updates the budget ledger in real-time as a transaction is modified.
5. Streamlines the reconciliation of budget versus actual reports against procurement data.

The visibility provided by a budgetary control solution for NetSuite enables executive leadership to monitor spending proactively throughout the enterprise. Budgetary control solutions also prevent major budget divergences from a financial plan. And the reconciliation tools built into budgetary control solutions help executive leadership understand why actual expenses diverged from the budget.

All of this results in more accurate financial planning.

Many companies now face new and largely unpredictable economic challenges. Old ways of NetSuite financial planning are not up to the task. Companies can create more accurate financial plans, easier, using budgetary control solutions as a guide to outmaneuver economic uncertainty.

Click here to learn how PyanGo can enhance your NetSuite financial planning.