2014 Innovation Award Nominee: Budget Maestro from Centage Corporation

As any accounting or finance professional can attest, budgeting is an incredibly time intensive process and the opportunity for errors is boundless – especially when Excel is involved. How many times have you sent out an Excel document to be filled in only to have people add templates, row and columns? And how many days did you have to spend undoing their “kind” edits?

No wonder why it won’t upload into the general ledger system! Budgets are complex which is why accounting professionals need driver-based budgeting solutions than can automate the process to reduce errors and save their sanity. Budget Maestro, from Centage Corporation, is an important step forward from spreadsheets and formula-based tools. The budgeting and planning software solution allows accounting professionals to concentrate on the structure and performance of the business, not on troubleshooting spreadsheets one cell at a time.  

With a sophisticated, but easy-to-use driver based approach to budgeting, forecasting and reporting, Budget Maestro 7.0 (released July 2012) offers customers GAAP & IFRS compliant synchronized and integrated P&L, balance sheet and cash flow reporting. The system is highly flexible, ready to be customized to an organization’s specific business model incorporating products, services, locations, account structure, key performance metrics, pay cycles, reporting requirements, and so on.  

The software features quick start wizards and drop-down menus which allow accountants to create budgets using prior year actuals, and rapidly assign spread methods to payments or receivables. In addition, dynamic real-time forecasting capabilities enable them to reforecast as needed; revenues and expenses driven from actuals allow users to increase or decrease their budget based on how actuals are trending. It also provides for global budget adjustments – for example a Cost of Living salary increases for all employees – and can easily modify or reverse them, as well.

Since the initial release of Budget Maestro 7.0, Centage has also made additional enhancements to the solution suite including significant updates to the reporting tool Analytics Maestro (November 2013). Analytics Maestro enables users to quickly see how they are performing against key performance indicators (KPIs) such as gross margin, cost per unit, and pricing, among others, and includes versatile analysis capabilities including drill-down to underlying data, trend analysis, filters and multi-dimension hierarchies.

Unlike other Excel reporting tools that rely on formulas, which can easily be compromised, Analytics Maestro is based on a formula-free algorithm that ensures the integrity of data and allows users to customize  In addition, innovations for the Budget Maestro family of solutions have continued with the introduction of OpenLink Maestro in March 2014.

While Budget Maestro is already known for its tight integration to leading mid market general ledger packages (Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, QuickBooks®, & Syspro,), the company furthered its connection to any accounting or GL system with OpenLink Maestro. OpenLink Maestro gives customers integrated, seamless access across one unified platform to a wide variety of GL/ERP systems including Epicor, Netsuite, Intaact, Infor, SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards and more. As a result, users can quickly and easily begin the budgeting process free of data inaccuracies and time consuming migration requirements.

 

Click here to see all of the other nominees for the 2014 Innovation Awards.