It’s time to say goodbye to multiple manual systems or confusing spreadsheets.
Using an automated, integrated Enterprise Resource Planning system for your budgeting will support business growth, decrease human error and increase employee satisfaction.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted many of the challenges faced by state government and public sector organizations’ legacy IT systems, which manage critical processes like budgeting.
When it comes to budgeting, increasing business complexity and growing public and regulatory scrutiny have created the need to put budget information into a single transparent strategy.
Meridian Partners has helped many public sector organizations, like school districts or state and municipal governments, update their legacy budgeting systems, and we can help you!
Are you thinking that it’s time for your organization to update its budgeting?
Here are four ways that streamlining your budgeting system will improve operations.
#1: You’ll save money.
Chances are that your budget operations are spread across multiple siloed solutions that don’t integrate well with other Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) & non-ERP systems. Not only are you paying extra money in subscription costs for each individual system, but there can be plenty of hidden costs included in using multiple platforms, such as employee time, productivity and wages.
You need an automated budgeting framework that uses a single application to manage all budgets and budget types (operating, capital, grants, etc.) and seamlessly integrates various management processes like procurement, contracts, accounting, expenditure management, and asset management.
#2: You’ll get full transparency with real time process visibility.
Are your budgets aligned with your organizational goals? Yes? No? It can be hard to tell if you’re using a budgeting system that doesn’t let you to look at the big picture.
When you use a single integrated system, you get real-time access to your budget information. You know exactly where your money is and what it’s doing at any point in time.
Not to mention that using an automated rather than manual system minimizes the potential for human error, meaning you can be assured in the integrity of your data and trust that the numbers you’re seeing accurately reflect your budget.
Which means that…
#3: You’ll be better prepared for your audits
Audits are a regular part of protecting and ensuring the business integrity of most organizations. But making sure that you comply with audits and stay on the right side of regulatory requirements can be stressful. It can keep C-Suite Leaders and Senior Managers up at night and take people away from their regular job duties to provide information for the auditing team.
An automated, updated ERP system will help you pull your budgeting information into reports that you need to pass your audits with flying colors. It can also highlight areas that pose potential red flags for auditors so that you can fix those scenarios before they turn into problems.
#4: You’ll spend less time putting together reports, so you can spend more time figuring out what’s possible.
When working with outdated legacy systems, staff can end up spending all their time hunting for the exact data needed for reporting. But with a modern ERP system, creating budgeting reports can be as simple as pushing a button.
That means your staff can spend less time crunching numbers, and more time looking at what you can do with your money. A proper ERP system provides real-time business insights that enable informed decisions and what-if analysis.
When you automate & simplify your budgeting system, you can spend more time looking at your desired outcomes and planning exactly how to get there.
Meridian Partners has almost two decades of experience customizing and implementing Budgeting and Planning solutions for public sector organizations.
When you work with Meridian, you get it right the first time.
We provide:
Proven methodology and implementation agility to meet timelines and requirements
Experts at public sector budgeting and budgeting systems
Project certainty without missed dates, surprises or overruns
Here's what that looks like...
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (COPA) is the 9th most densely populated state in the country, with the 6th largest budget: an approximately $78 billion total annual budget and ~12 agencies with different accounting and financial systems.
COPA's legacy budgeting system was aging rapidly, making it was difficult and costly to modify, update and maintain.
COPA selected Meridian to implement a modern budgeting solution. Meridian designed, built and configured a new budgeting application, data models and calculations using a rapid prototyping approach, retaining the core functionality of required reports and data input screens, but with a new, intuitive and user-friendly look and feel.
It worked for them, and it can work for you too.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and learn how we can work together to improve your organization's budgeting system.
Meridian Partners is a minority owned company and SBA-certified 8(a) leader in providing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Intelligence, and Budgeting solutions. Meridian helps organizations maximize business processes to be more agile, efficient, and transparent through the optimization of their enterprise systems.
