NetSuite Planning & Budgeting
The mPower team is often asked about tracking actual results to budget and/or the forecast or plan. We have implemented and supported NSPB for several clients and we are highlighting the application. Many organizations today are challenged with stale, inaccurate, and delayed data that is disconnected from current business operations when conducting planning and budgeting cycles. This results in longer manual efforts for planning and communicating financial forecasts to stakeholders. NetSuite has a solution.
NSPB – Home Screen:
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, or NSPB for short, is an FP&A offering from NetSuite with the ability to directly communicate with the NetSuite ERP as well as bring in third party data. NSPB brings in data, in most cases, in one of two ways.
- The first and primary way is through Saved Searches in the NetSuite ERP system.
- These saved searches are queries that compile your companies’ metadata and data from your ERP system according to your own criteria and filters. NSPB then leverages these saved searches and brings over your data to its separate planning and budgeting environment. Typically, this is done on a nightly basis but can be refreshed manually as often as needed.
- The second common way is using NSPB’s Excel add in feature referred to as SmartView.
- SmartView brings all the planning and forecasting capabilities from NSPB into an excel document. This allows data to be uploaded directly into the system, such as budgets, forecasts, employees, etc., as well as allowing data to be exported.
While the data connectivity and versatility are fantastic, the actual planning and budgeting capability is where the system truly shines. Using sophisticated modeling capabilities, predictive analytics, and rolling forecasts, NSPB provides business visibility into performance and facilitates real time decision-making. This is demonstrated through its ability to be completely tailored to your specific business through custom financial statements, revenue/expense models, and workforce models. This is coupled with the fact that NSPB can handle many custom dimensions to plan and segment your data. Out of the box, the system also comes loaded with prebuilt trend options you can use for forecasting revenue and expense data allowing you to create custom forecasts and budgets with the click of a button.
Scenario planning is done very easily as well. Allowing for the creation of specific case scenarios, such as “What If”, “Best Case”, and “Worst Case”, NSPB can handle whatever budget variation or plan variation you may need to create or store.
Reporting and Analytics Form Example:
When analyzing reports with the use of drill-through inside of NSPB, users can drill down into a value and see multiple levels of detail describing how that number was determined and the source of where number originated. This culminates with the drill through bringing you back to the NetSuite ERP (source system). For example, you can see the journal entry at its lowest level.
Drilldown Example 1:
Drilldown Example 2:
NSPB is a very large and incredibly fast-growing FP&A tool with remarkable features for any business in any industry. Through its multifaceted functionality, robust capability, and data transparency, NSPB leads the way in the FP&A space.
Contact your mPower lead if you would like to learn more about NSPB and how it may help with your budgeting process and FP&A reporting.
