Businesses these days are increasingly gravitating towards cloud migration, convinced of the incompetency of on-premises software solutions in keeping pace with the market velocity. One of the key factors driving this migration is the monetary crisis that came upon businesses with the pandemic. The importance of better financial management and budgeting is now gaining greater priority. Smart budgeting and forecasting are being realized as inevitable measures to mitigate damage, foresee crises, and improve financial stability. Cutting-edge solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations are thoughtfully built to streamline such complex tasks.

Budget Planning

With the budget planning capability in Dynamics 365 comes new possibilities for saving time, cost, and effort in managing finances, so that one can focus on the real deal. Through budgeting, businesses can have better visibility and enforce closer control over expenditure by using various controls such as project cost control, purchasing cost control, etc. A budget-plan document tightly integrated with Microsoft Excel provides the base for long-term strategic planning and annual budget planning. D365 Finance and Operations, with Excel integration, simplifies complicated workflows with seamlessly working budget planning worksheets and account charts. Dynamics 365 users can create a budgeting organizational hierarchy to support both top-down and bottom-up budgeting methods. Once the budget is approved, the budget plan is converted into a budget register entry that offers tools for maintaining the budgets and amounts visible through budget codes.

Budgeting Tools

The most frequently used type of budgeting tools in Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations are General Ledger budgets, primarily used to plan various expenses and revenue. There are other budgeting capabilities integrated with ledger budgets.

• Workforce budgets – Planning in detail for positions, compensation groups, etc., is part of the budgeting process for the workforce.
• Fixed assets budgets – Using information about fixed assets, you can determine expected depreciation and record other scheduled activities that are connected to them.
• Project budgets – Project budgets can be utilized to create a detailed prognosis for a project which may include the time, expense, and resources required.
• Demand forecast budget – Based on previous expenditure, you can draw up an estimation of future demands in the inventory and plan the replenishment accordingly.

With the help of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations’ Budget Planning function, you can efficiently manage the budget for your business and determine the available funds with just a click. To keep track of the annual or monthly expenditure, one can easily leverage the power of financial tools offered by Dynamics 365 F&O, that go ahead and coalesce the revenue data and operational cost. The budget control feature plays a pivotal role in enabling the user to monitor and analyze the congruities or disparities between the planned budget and the ongoing rate of expenditure at any given point in the budget cycle.

Budget Control

Another key feature that falls under budgeting is budget control. While budget planning deals with creating and approving budgets within D365, budget control capability deals with limiting transactions based on definite rules. Budget control has an extensible framework, which is fully integrated into D365, and it provides controls broadly on soft and hard levels. Soft level control will provide a warning to users upon exceeding the budget amount, but it still allows the user to continue with the transactions. Hard Level control restricts the users to post the transactions once the budget is exceeded. The budget control feature plays a pivotal role in enabling the user to monitor and analyze the congruities or disparities between the planned budget and the ongoing rate of expenditure at any given point in the budget cycle. Dynamics 365 uses the factors below to effectuate those budgetary controls:

• Financial Dimensions- This will allow the users to track the budget vs actuals against the relevant account in combination with the required financial dimension.
• User Group – This will provide the applicable users with the necessarily required authorizations to exceed the available budgets or restrict the users depending on the user rights and permissions and prompt the relevant error message based on exceeding the threshold or the budget amount.
• Source Documents and Journals – This will enable the user to evaluate the applicable document or journal against the budget by line level or against the whole document.
• Time – This allows the actuals to be evaluated against the budget funds aligned with the fiscal calendar.
• Configurable calculation of available funds – This allows the documents like journals, purchase requisitions, and purchase orders to be considered even in the draft while determining the available funds.

Budget Forecasting

Financial or budget forecasting is a substantial component of budget planning, that denotes an organization’s ability to foresee its financial status based on previous records. This enables businesses to forge a clearer picture of their financial goals and the means of achieving maximum ROI through smart budgeting. This is impelled through the integration of Power BI into Dynamics 365 F&O and other data sources, that help create custom reports and dashboards that reflect current trends, analyze performances, and predict future outcomes.

For most businesses, to recover from the crisis caused by the pandemic, a solid financial foundation is imperative. Fiscal planning is a vital aspect of an organization, that requires efficient budgeting and forecasting to project better financial performance, outperform the previous record, and secure funds. To smoothly navigate monetary challenges with a steady vision, organizations need to adopt a dynamic ERP system that can administer unique tailored strategies and seamlessly streamline financial processes.