How to Choose the Right Consolidation and Budgeting Solutions

Consolidation and planning

Financial consolidation plays a crucial role in reporting, planning, agile budgeting and forecasting. Therefore, consolidation solutions should not be chosen in isolation but taking planning and analytics into consideration to avoid the creation of silos. Business consolidation provides a unified view of a company’s performance through detailed up-to-date analyses, which is why having effective consolidation and budgeting software is vital to creating the basis for sustainable planning and successful corporate performance management.

Integrated vs standalone solutions for consolidation and budgeting

Fully integrated solutions such as Talentia CPM improve financial consolidation processes, as well as budgeting and forecasting, by allowing you to streamline business planning processes, bringing users and data together on a single platform.

On the other hand, the best-of-breed approach through a standalone solution has a much narrower focus and does not rely on a single vendor to deliver technology, enabling multiple solutions to work in collaboration. In short, it is about choosing solutions that are specific to a particular domain and area of expertise.

Cost-effectiveness

The decision to update your business consolidation and budgeting tools involves justifying the cost of the new software solution. This also applies when choosing between a unified platform, which is more costly, or a standalone consolidation package with the exact functionality for your company. When choosing consolidation software, make sure you choose your provider or vendors carefully and bear the following in mind:

• Consolidation software implementation cost: is it fixed or based on time and material?
• Licensing fees: do they include maintenance and software updates?
• Maintenance and scalability expenses: how self-maintainable is the solution?

Essential features of consolidation and budgeting solutions

The main purpose of CPM software is to achieve seamless integration ensuring the thoroughness and accuracy of results and data. Thus, a successful consolidation, budgeting, and forecasting system should be fast to implement, as well as easy to use. Accordingly, the following are some of the most important functions you should look for:

• Straightforward access from anywhere.
• High performance and scalability to manage large amounts of data from different sources across the company, handling simultaneous users and heavy workloads.
• Currency conversion, intercompany eliminations, journal entries, etc.
• Legal and statutory consolidation.
• Fast and accurate financial close.
• Budgeting, forecasting and planning

If you are still wondering whether you need to upgrade your consolidation system, check out the latest white paper by BPM Partners for more detailed information on the subject, and trust Talentia for the best modern CPM software solutions.