Centage > Case Studies > Ease and Flexibility Transform Budgeting Process, Providing Deeper Analysis and Significant Time Savings

Ease and Flexibility Transform Budgeting Process, Providing Deeper Analysis and Significant Time Savings

Customer Company Size

SME

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Microsoft Forecaster
Centage’s cloud-based budgeting and forecasting solution

Tech Stack

Cloud Computing

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Cost Savings

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms

Applicable Industries

Education

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

About The Customer

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) is a non-profit trade association that issues professional certifications for the information technology industry. It is considered one of the industry’s top trade associations. Headquartered in the greater Chicago area, with numerous locations around the world, CompTIA supports IT professionals through their education, certification, advocacy, and philanthropy initiatives.

The Challenge

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a non-profit trade association, was facing significant challenges with their budgeting and planning solution, Microsoft Forecaster. The software had several shortcomings that were critical for CompTIA to address. Internationally based users were frequently locked out of the software on the server in Chicago, struggling to simply access or record their budget numbers. The application couldn’t roll forward prior budgets or utilize actuals. CFO Brian Laffey lamented, “You always had to build budgets from the ground up.” Creating unique reports consumed Laffey’s finance team every month. Specific parameters that each manager wanted to see had to be identified monthly for the report view to be created. The process involved downloading data to Excel, filtering and sorting the data, and then individually creating each report.

The Solution

After an extensive search, CompTIA selected Centage’s easy-to-use, scalable cloud-based budgeting and forecasting solution as the clear winner that not only met but exceeded their requirements and expectations. The solution’s formula-free environment gives Laffey confidence that the budgets he and his team develop are reliable and accurate. It’s strict adherence to the chart of accounts alleviates concerns about data integrity by catching potential coding errors while increasing the value of the plans developed with one-to-one comparisons between budgets and actuals. The new solution offers flexibility for users to enter exact counts, dollars, and percentages in value fields, while in the past users spent their already scarce time making trial-and-error guesses to get to the value that they wanted to budget for. For example, if a manager wanted to budget 500 units sold of a particular item, they had to enter a percentage value of an overall figure rather than the exact 500-unit amount, making the process cumbersome and error-prone. The ability to collaborate with other CompTIA executives in their native currencies and in U.S. dollars streamlines the workflow and provides the platform that Laffey needed to more easily digest financial data from both headquarters and abroad. Multi currency reporting provides increased accountability at the local level as the users take additional ownership of the budgets they submit. Centage’s cloud-based solution provides the global access they required along with a quick and easy implementation and a short training timeline.

Operational Impact

CompTIA’s new budgeting and planning solution began an exciting transition for the company that included deeper analysis, an engaging user interface and significant gains in time savings and maintenance.
Comparing current-year budget to actuals has increased the responsiveness of the management teams. Budgets and expenditures are modified based on trends they are seeing, something they weren’t able to do in the past.
Today the process of creating unique management reports each month involves the user selecting their report and running it themselves. Within 15 minutes, the finance team creates each custom report template versus the hour each month that it took per report in the past.
When budget numbers need to be revised, adjusting one field or many with the solution’s flexible what-if modeling requires just a few keystrokes.

Quantitative Benefit

Laffey estimates that CompTIA is saving over 400 staff hours each year in the annual budget development process alone.
Future budgets will be developed in local currencies and Laffey is confident the process will go smoothly and increase the accuracy of the results.
The finance team creates each custom report template within 15 minutes versus the hour each month that it took per report in the past.
When a line item needed to be changed previously by ten percent, it easily took a couple hours. Now it takes a couple minutes and its very simple for us to do.