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Excel vs Abraxio, a rematch!
Excel and CIO Budgets are often…
- “But who blew up the calculation formula again?”
- “What is the latest file version?”
- “What budget did we start with again at the beginning of the year?”
- “Can you pull up the Top10 of our infra spending across all subsidiaries?”
- “Isn’t the current Budgets up to date? I have to share it at this afternoon’s Copil
!” - “For the new budget year, are we starting from scratch?”
Do these situations sound familiar? They should! Because using Excel to manage an IT department’s Budgets isn’t optimal, and it’s often tedious. At Abraxio, we got fed up with having to use spreadsheets to steer our CIO’s Budgets, and set about overcoming all their limitations.
1. Working together on a Budgets without losing control
With Excel
Data deletions, unintentional formula modifications, unwanted column additions, files left open by a user or conflicting versions…
Not to mention the difficulty of maintaining repositories over time and keeping track of modifications….
A shared budget in Excel means extra control time, and no controlled delegation.
- With Abraxio
Abraxio lets you delegate your Budgets with peace of mind, by assigning specific areas of responsibility to your managers and keeping track of changes made.
You can allocate each activity or Projects Budgets to managers (or to yourself). By delegating, you can share the workload and give your managers greater responsibility for their own areas, while retaining complete control over the whole process and the traceability of changes made.
2. Point out your commitments as precisely as possible, Made simple
With Excel
Two schools are frequently distinguished:
commitments are managed in an invoice tab separate from the Budgets tab; the Budget tab points to each of the lines in the invoice tab: a painstaking, tedious and fragile task to maintain in its integrity.
> or the Budgets are tracked using a column added to the budget tab; while this has the advantage of simplicity, it greatly limits traceability and detailed tracking over time.
- With Abraxio
Abraxio makes it easy to link your purchase orders and invoices to the right budget lines, even when there are several of them: single entry, assisted entry from the Abraxio EDM or automated mass import from your accounting systems or infocenter.
There are a number of ways in which you can effectively track your commitments. And while you’re at it, you can also easily integrate your depreciation allowances.
3. Comparing Budgets over time without drowning in versions
With Excel
Often, comparison over time with Excel is reduced to stacking tabs by Budgets version over the years, and feeding the summary with searches across all the tabs.
As for highlighting discrepancies, these can be managed by setting up specific rules or comments.
The result is a process that makes it difficult to delegate tracking and data maintenance.
- With Abraxio
Because comparing X versions of Budgets in different tabs or files can be laborious and error-prone, Abraxio makes it easy to reconcile your fiscal years or financial statements simply by choosing the point of comparison over time.
4. Put Budgets into perspective and automate real-time Reporting
With Excel
Ah, pivot tables... Whether it’s an accounting view, by supplier, by type of purchase, by project, etc., each new analytical need has its own pivot table, often converted, for illustration purposes, into a graphic representation of limited scope.
To overcome this archaism and limit the pitfalls (updating, reliability, modernity), some CIOs resort to outsourced reports, produced in a dedicated B.I. tool.
This solution is certainly more rewarding and more in tune with the times, but it often involves specific maintenance by a member of staff or a third party, and non-instantaneous updates deferred to D+ a few hours or D+1.
- With Abraxio
Why choose between real-time data and modern tools?
With Abraxio, you can benefit from a tenfold increase in analysis capacity by cross-referencing axes of analysis and comparisons over time. In just a few clicks, you can create views tailored to your individual needs, updated in real time…
And that’s not all. Go beyond pie charts and histograms, and take advantage of automatically generated real-time Dashboards and reports to facilitate collaboration with managers, controllers and even senior management.
5. No more copying and pasting to plan your next exercise
With Excel
Planning your new budget year from scratch?
No, of course not, because we’ve accumulated a few successive copies of files to keep track of Budgets and versions.
And so it’s from an earlier version that you prepare your new exercise, by copying and pasting Run lines, and replanning Build Projects.
The result is a maintenance burden that grows heavier every year , and a budget planning process that remains as complex as ever.
- With Abraxio
You automatically initialize 50-70% of your new Budgets simply by renewing your Run and taking into account Projects already planned. This means you can concentrate on new projects and simulate different scenarios.
A considerable time-saving, as assessed by our customer users:“4 clicks are all it takes to prepare a new budget. Thanks to Abraxio, I’ve shortened my budget preparation process from 3 months to less than 2 weeks,” says Arnaud Percie du Sert, CIO at Iserba.
6. Forget the headache of double management: Executive Budgets/Project budgets
With Excel
Many IT departments and divisions operate on the same Excel model: Run activities are steered within a budget tracking file for the year, while Build projects are treated separately, with their own tracking resources, shared with the Projects Teams.
Inevitably, data reconciliation is time-consuming because it has to be continuous. It impacts budget preparation right up to the last day of the financial year, as projects evolve.
- With Abraxio
Because the life of Projects is often less linear than the calendar of a Budgets exercise, it’s finally possible to automatically update current and future Budgets in real time with Abraxio.
How does it work in practice? If a project straddles two financial years, the management’s Budgets will cover part of one year and the rest of the next.
If a project shifts a few months into your next fiscal year, your Budgets are automatically updated for the current and next fiscal years.
Abraxio automatically reconciles your annual management Budgets with your Projects in real time.
Want to find out more?
Watch the replay of our webinar (30 mn) to push back all the limits of Excel and rebuild an efficient new Budgets, easy to manage, steer and communicate!
