NetSuite Planning and Budgeting Made Better with the Right FP&A Integration

Companies using ERP software experienced an 11% reduction in operational costs on average. If you’re currently using Oracle NetSuite, you’ve no doubt seen a wide variety of improvements across your organization. That said, many, many organizations fail to extract maximal value from their ERP because they fail to make the most out of the NetSuite planning and budgeting potential. 

The Major Benefit of Planning and Budgeting with NetSuite

One of the most laborious parts of FP&A is the manual entry of financial and operational data into spreadsheets and other forms. Gathering this data from across your organization takes hundreds of workforce hours and is, let’s face it, a menial task beneath the expertise of your financial team. 

Worse yet, despite all the advances in technology, FP&A is taking roughly 10% more time than it was a decade previous. 

The major benefit of NetSuite budgeting and forecasting is that the ERP gathers all your data, consolidating it and making it easier to transfer over to Excel (or whatever tool you use to facilitate FP&A activities). 

While this does save your team some time, it isn’t enough. NetSuite financial planning and budgeting functionality simply isn’t able to help your organization cut down on those hundreds of wasted hours because they still have to manually input the data from the ERP into your FP&A tool. 

In other words, planning and budgeting with NetSuite does help, but it by no means solves the problem. We’re talking about saving a few hours, not dozens of hours. 

But the good news is that you can quickly and easily enhance NetSuite budgeting and forecasting with one simple integration, helping you cut down your reporting and budgeting time by as much as 75%.

How can you accomplish this NetSuite planning and budgeting optimization? 

Optimizing NetSuite Budgeting and Forecasting

Planning and budgeting in NetSuite can be significantly improved by integrating it with an FP&A platform that leverages the data consolidation functionality of NetSuite and gathers the data into the FP&A platform, saving your team hundreds of hours of time every year.

By automating planning and budgeting in NetSuite with the right FP&A integration, you can save your financeteam hours of frustration and allow them to use that time much more productively by analyzing the data, helping you better determine high ROI resource allocation. 

Aside from NetSuite planning and budgeting enhancements, NetSuite forecasting (which is to say using the data from your NetSuite when forecasting) is much more robust. 

How to Improve NetSuite Forecasting and NetSuite Financial Planning with the Right Integration

For many organizations, the real benefits of NetSuite planning and budgeting are in forecasts and planning. 

Yes, using NetSuite for reporting is obviously a benefit to your business in terms of making this business process much easier and simpler, but by leveraging the real-time data from NetSuite, you will improve forecast accuracy. 

Better yet, once the integrated financial data is examined using a robust FP&A platform, you’ll unlock a number of business insights that were formerly unavailable to your business. That’s because, when only combining Netsuite planning and budgeting with Excel, you’re using past financial statements and other data sources, often weeks or months behind when you’re finished with the process of transferring data over. 

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But with integrated FP&A software, you’ll be able to use real-time data to inform decisions, so your data is always the most accurate and reflects the circumstances you’re facing that day - not last quarter. 

This is especially important in volatile economic times where interest rates, pandemic closings, bank collapses, etc., have all demonstrated that economic situations can dramatically shift in just a few hours or days. 

This also facilitates driver-based planning, whereby you can begin to really peel back the layers of your financial data, assessing where the growth areas are within your organization and enabling you to allocate the appropriate resources to this department in support of these high-yield efforts. 

The Next Level of NetSuite Budgeting and Forecasting

If your organization continues to use Excel for FP&A, then your financial planning and analysis team has likely run into a number of frustrations and gaps in that tool; it’s simply not sustainable for a high-growth business. NetSuite budgeting and forecasting can be an excellent driver of value at your enterprise - but only with the right FP&A platform. And, frankly speaking, Excel is not it. 

But FP&A software providers are aware of this issue, and are also aware of the fact that many organizations are familiar with the look and feel of Excel. That’s why they’ve developed Excel replacements that allow your organization to scale without forcing your FP&A team to learn an entirely new system. Instead, they’ve been able to take that look and feel of Excel, but make it far more robust and sophisticated without increasing complexity. Moreover, the best FP&A software is designed to integrate seamlessly into your ERP, equating to no time wasted when implementing your new FP&A platform. 

Check Out Limelight Cloud FP&A Software for Better Planning and Budgeting in NetSuite

Ready to greatly enhance the functionality of your NetSuite planning and budgeting - while also saving your team hundreds of hours? Then you’re ready for Limelight Cloud FP&A Software.

We are a NetSuite integration that can:

  • Save your FP&A team hundreds of hours during FP&A tasks with our automation
  • Leverage data in real-time from your ERP
  • Keep track of in-depth audit trails to ensure data integrity
  • Uncover hidden costs, leading to significant savings
  • Support planning activities like risk mitigation and what-if scenario modeling
  • Interrogate data to reveal rich insights that in turn can inform business critical decisions

Get a free demo and see how with one integration you can unlock the full potential of your NetSuite ERP.