Whether it’s running our business or our household, a critical component to both is the proper managing of a budget. In many instances, the process of managing a budget is often a manual, labor-intensive effort. This typically begins with setting priorities and developing a strategic business plan. But to boil this down, it’s fundamentally an exercise in prioritizing needs and wants. This requires adequate funding and investments, or more plainly, balancing revenues and expenses.
Challenges - When done manually, this usually involves multiple pieces of paper or various spreadsheets done in excel, capturing the hours involved in tasks, the dollars planned and spent, and the resources, labor, and materials required to achieve our business goals. When done 1) manually, this can be very challenging, 2) keeping track of where all this financial data exists, 3) the effort tracking the funding coming into our budget against the planned and actual expenses going out, and 4) finally generating reports to confirm that we are staying in the black and not swimming in red. And with most things in life, having the ability to pivot and quickly adjust when our actual reality veers from our prudent planning.
The Solution
The solution to these manual budgeting challenges is migrating to and adopting an automated budgeting software solution. Most organizations realize how imperative it is to get on the road to digital transformation. Rather than sifting the myriad spreadsheets and paper containing various parts of the budgeting process, and keeping your fingers crossed that you have the latest and greatest financial information, organizations now utilize the various software applications to better automate the managing, tracking, and reporting of their company’s business. This often means purchasing a financial budgeting software application as well as a project management solution. It’s a combination of capturing the monthly and annual funding revenue measured against the daily and weekly resource labor hours and material cost that can now be tracked and managed all in one centralized database repository. No more multiple excel spreadsheets of various versions. Data errors are now reduced utilizing built-in software validation rules.
Budgets can now be shared and accessed more easily with others, leveraging not only the internet and desktop computers, but the mobility of accessing financial data via laptops, tablets, or mobile phones. This allows improved collaboration and fewer manual hours spent chasing and updating the latest spreadsheet. Increased automation now allows better metrics and analytics, using machine learning algorithms to describe trends and patterns and predict and recommend better business budgeting practices in the future.
CORAS - Solution
At CORAS, we solve these budgeting challenges with our CORAS Nodes Enterprise Decision Management Platform. Our DOD customers use CORAS to simply and easily ingest fiscal year budget funding, line-item spend plan, and project management tasks and activities, via our ETL engine into our centralized, consolidated data lake repository. Customers can enter their monthly planned and actual labor hours, ODC charges, and external labor as well as the schedule of tasks and milestones as well as automatically ingest this information from external files such as Microsoft Project and Excel. The CORAS Node Map provides a rich visualization of the organization's structure and hierarchy as well as the drill-down capability to view detailed project information that is automatically aggregated across projects, programs, and portfolios. A self-service reporting capability provides standardized briefing templates and instant credibility to DOD leadership. Built into the CORAS Nodes EDMP are Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing capability to process both structured and unstructured data sources. This allows the analysis of data sources such as descriptions, emails, and text to identify trends and patterns within “dark” data that have been typically been ignored.
If you want to learn more about CORAS and how you can change how you interact with your budget and get you ahead of 2021 then leave a comment down below or contact us here!