Advice From a CFO: How to Avoid Pitfalls During Budget Season
Published on:31 October 2024
AP Automation for your
peace of mind- we got this.
Spooky season a.k.a. budget season is here. Are you ready for it?
Imagine creating a budget without getting bogged down in details, inaccurate cost forecasts, and time-consuming revisions. With the right tools and strategies, it’s actually doable.
In this article, Kristian Gylling, CFO at Rillion, shares his top tips for a smoother, more accurate budget—to help you avoid common pitfalls.
Contents
Read full article
1. Break Down and Analyze Each Cost Item
A common challenge in the budgeting process is understanding the costs fully. To create an accurate budget, you need a clear picture of all the costs behind the result. It’s not enough to just look at the income statement, you need to review and understand what’s actually behind each cost item.
“Companies often keep track of the big costs, such as salaries. The difficulties arise when you need to break down invoiced costs to understand what they actually relate to,” explains Kristian.
2. Create a Detailed Overview of Invoices and Cash Flow
With the right tool, you can quickly break down costs to the invoice level and clearly see what’s actually behind the numbers on the income statement.
“Rillion’s AP automation platform allows you to search and visualize invoices by account, department, company, or supplier. You can access detailed information at invoice level and quickly break down costs. The tool also gives you an overview of cash flow and your average credit periods, so you can forecast payments from suppliers and predict your future cash flow more accurately,” explains Kristian.
Read also: 11 Reasons Why Automating Accounts Payable is a Game-Changer
3. Making Cost Analysis Accessible to Budget Managers
Another challenge is to make the cost analysis accessible to all budget holders. To facilitate the budgeting process, and avoid time-consuming obstacles and mistakes, everyone involved must have access to the same data. The right people need to see the right costs to be able to do their part of the budget work efficiently and correctly.
“It is important to make the cost analysis available to all relevant people in the company so that they can see for themselves what costs they have to relate to and what they take away from the outcome. In Rillion, budget managers can find exactly the invoices and costs behind the figures in the income statement,” says Kristian.
4. Bringing Budgeting Together on One Platform
Companies’ tech stacks are growing and it is becoming increasingly common to have several systems for different functions, instead of a unified business system that handles everything. This creates a greater need for tools that can gather all relevant information in one place to streamline and simplify budget work.
“Rillion makes it possible to extract and compile information from different systems so that you get a clear overview and can draw meaningful conclusions from the data. It is a useful tool for all budget managers, as it saves both time and effort by providing deeper insights into costs,” concludes Kristian.
Survive the Budget Season With Rillion
More exciting reading
