The capital budgeting process: What’s next after the ink is dry?
You’re halfway through Q1, your annual capital budgeting process is done and loaded in the system; fiscal year-end reporting is wrapped up. Now you can breathe a sigh of relief, right? Hardly! Annual budgets are typically outdated as soon they are approved. So if you need to revise forecast or make changes to operations now’s […]
Capital Budgeting Essentials: What to Look for When Choosing a Capex Software Solution
Most companies would agree that the objective of making smart capital budgeting decisions is to ultimately acquire assets that are worth more than they cost. While the process of making those decisions can vary dramatically from one company to the next, there may be near-universal agreement that said process should be easier and more effective. […]
The Art of Building Consensus: Rallying a Buying Group Around an Enterprise Capital Planning Solution
You’ve identified a problem that needs to be solved. You’ve explored solutions to resolve that problem, identified what’s required, and have a supplier in mind that you believe is a great fit. Now comes the hardest part for many: getting everyone who has a say in approving a final decision on board. This is where […]
Elevating Your Approach to Capex: From Project Focus to Portfolio Management
As the manufacturer of a product, it takes many inputs to produce a good for sale: materials, labor, and capital equipment. You have a system to track labor by job. Your job costing system tracks material usage against standards and notes variances. But are you tracking Capex spend? Do you know the status of your […]
Beyond Budgeting: How EPM Solutions Stack Up for Capex
Let’s get right to the point: you wouldn’t want to go into a battle blindfolded … and if making better capital allocation decisions is a priority at your company, you can’t count on an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) system to enable you to do so. That’s not to say that EPM software doesn’t have a […]
FP&A From the Frontlines: Nonstandard Reporting in an Ever-Changing Environment
There are some axioms in financial management you simply can’t violate no matter how smart or how good you are. For instance: when it comes to FP&A reporting, you may want fast, accurate and cheap, but you can only pick two. Of the three, in my experience, the only “non-negotiable” choice among them is “accurate.” […]
FP&A From the Frontlines: How human effort and hard work aren’t substitutes for sound processes & technological leverage
I can still remember walking a 3.5 inch floppy disk down the hallway of a billion dollar company. On it: our balance sheet for the controller to review. I’m dating myself, for sure. I’ve been in finance and accounting for a while, and have witnessed the move from mainframe to client server and now the […]
SaaS and the Cloud vs. Custom-Built On-Premise Apps: What Finance Teams Need to Know
SaaS and the Cloud vs. Custom-Built On-Premise Applications: What Teams in Finance Need to Know Prior to the early 2000s, most enterprises purchased software and applications that lived “on-premise” — meaning they were installed, stored and administered locally. With its founding in 1999, however, Salesforce.com changed everything. One of the first to deliver enterprise applications […]
Three Common Hurdles to Implementing Capex Automation and How to Overcome Them
The concept of digital transformation of finance has become such a hot-button issue. With so many varying takes on the topic, it’s no surprise that many organizations struggle with building their roadmap. This can be particularly true when it comes to Capex automation. Conventional wisdom suggests that Capex automation is a “no-brainer” given the role […]
An Engineer’s Guide to Capex Automation
You’ve thought through every detail and have full confidence that the solution you’re proposing is right for the business challenge or need at hand. But it doesn’t get approved for funding. What happened? The answer can be complex. But it starts with the recognition that engineering projects and financial decisions are inexorably tied together. So […]