Budgeting often creates seemingly insurmountable challenges for businesses, not to mention issues that result from bad reporting. With financial data being so valuable and vital to today’s business operations, across all departments, having a way to plan finances and share that data for projects in a way that everyone can understand becomes a necessity. One solution we regularly turn to is Solver, as the leading budget planning software that integrates with Microsoft Business Central, Sage Intacct, and other ERP systems.
When You Already Have an ERP, Why Solver?
One of the big challenges when diving into reporting and budgeting is that company spreadsheets tend to be really big (and here bigger is definitely not better). Business data comes from a lot of different places besides your accounting system, alongside constant changes within your systems, all of which need to be logged. See the issue?
When operating exclusively with spreadsheets, all changes must be made manually in Excel, which can be painful. It’s not uncommon to experience error messages resulting from broken links, incorrect formulas, missing cells; the list goes on, especially as spreadsheets become bigger. These challenges become massive when any approval needs are factored into the workflow. Despite the natural interface between Excel and MS Business Central, as a growing company’s reporting and budgeting needs become more advanced, they need external budget planning software, or to be more specific, they need financial planning and analysis (FP&A) tools.
Key Benefits
That’s where Solver comes in as one of the best true xFP&As. It resolves all of those Excel-related challenges by using its data warehouse, coupled with the ability to handle actuals and ultimately be the only reporting and budgeting tool a company needs. By connecting data sources to Solver and centralizing to a single source of truth, many trickle-down benefits become available.
As Solver states on its website, the solution allows businesses to “provide key stakeholders greater visibility across the organization, leading to better decisions with an intelligent xFP&A solution. Easily connect data to Solver and unleash powerful functionality for planning, reporting, consolidation and analysis. Stay ahead of the ever-changing business world and use data to gain a competitive edge.” While, of course, there are other FP&A or budget planning software options, some of the additional benefits we’ve found with Solver include:
- ERP Agnostic
Solver can connect to a variety of ERP platforms beyond BC, like Sage Intacct, and works with integrations like PointClickCare, Tableau or Power BI, providing a lot of flexibility.
- Fast to Deploy and Easy to Learn
One of Solver’s best features is the immediate return on investment, with a quick setup and light on the learning curve (many Sage Intacct users find report writing more intuitive than the Intacct tool), helping teams adopt it into their workflows almost instantly. According to 61% of execs, digital transformation is a priority but they run into issues making the change, so a program with a straightforward implementation, that’s easier to design for, and has faster adoption rates is welcome. - Consolidated Cloud-Based Budgeting
The Solver data warehouse brings separate systems together via the cloud, allowing companies to consolidate and automate budgeting for better visibility and collaboration. This not only brings in a modern solution that will continuously be kept up to date, but with the secure cloud API integrations that protect all of the data that businesses will analyze. - Data Management That Pulls All Your Data Together
With centralized data, teams get simplified reporting from Solver as opposed to working with each different system’s reports, providing easier access to insights. This of course provides the always championed “single source of truth” but also minimizes manual data entry, saving time while providing better insight.
Transforming Your Business with Solver
As businesses grow, they can struggle to pull their increasing influx of data together into something sensical and accessible for their team. That’s where Solver can be truly transformative – and we don’t use that word lightly. By putting the “x” (for extended) in xFP&A, your system can grab and analyze all that operational data, from census to inventory to capital and more in moments. It provides excellent tools to help organize and then present data through graphical reporting, making it much easy to review.
Decision-makers can also use its built-in features to budget better (<- click to see our team’s video on how to improve budgeting) and perform in-depth analysis.
True Partnership
In our years of experience with Solver, we have used its handy what-if analysis and modelling tool to run through situations that prove it can handle relatable problems most businesses experience. It doesn’t break when making connections, and we’ve seen how effective our built-in workflow processes are at allowing different users and departments to participate in the budget model.
We worked with a client on their ERP implementation whose reporting was a nightmare. In this instance, we prioritized Solver so that they could immediately organize all their reporting while we put the time into perfecting their ERP set-up. It saved them hours of headaches and was a simple connection at the end of the process, unifying their ERP with their now familiar Solver set-up
What Solver offers is a comprehensive business intelligence and budget planning software solution that is simultaneously sophisticated and simple. It can serve as an entry point for a business or become the backbone of its entire workflow for reporting and budgeting when an ERP cannot. If you’re curious about any of its functionality or how to fit it into your business, connect with our team and we’ll talk it over.
