To help businesses in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) drive accurate, connected plans across the business and be prepared for what's next, Oracle NetSuite has announced new updates to NetSuite Planning and Budgeting.

The latest updates to NetSuite Planning and Budgeting is designed to help businesses in ANZ make data-informed decisions by providing the flexibility to adjust budgets and forecasts, the company states.

Evan Goldberg, Founder and EVP, Oracle NetSuite, comments, "Many of the challenges in the budgeting and forecasting processes stem from using the wrong tools. Boards and business leaders depend on getting the right numbers. Errors reduce their confidence and could lead to misguided decisions.

"Right now, accurate financial planning and analysis is critical. Spreadsheets cannot support a business properly and quarterly planning is not enough. The new features in NetSuite Planning and Budgeting help businesses in Australia and New Zealand confidently and continuously navigate and plan for change within one collaborative and scalable solution."

The latest updates to NetSuite Planning and Budgeting are planned for later this year and include:

• Version Builder Wizard: Helps businesses deal with market changes by delivering enhanced scenario planning functionality. This functionality makes it easier for customers to model a range of budget or forecast scenarios. By automating simulations, it also helps businesses quickly and easily understand the potential impact of different variables, identify potential opportunities and risks, and make faster, smarter decisions.
• Task Manager: Helps businesses define, execute, and report on the interdependent activities of a business process. It provides centralised monitoring of all tasks and provides a visible, automated, repeatable system of record for running a business process. This enables users to define the tasks and schedule to ensure the most efficient task flow, automate the business process, monitor and track status, and analyse the effectiveness of a process.

According to the company, NetSuite Planning and Budgeting is already enabling businesses to automate labour-intensive planning and budgeting processes so finance teams can produce budgets and forecasts, model what-if scenarios, and generate reports all within one collaborative, scalable solution.

According to the company, businesses are using NetSuite Planning and Budgeting to assist with: 

• Budgeting and forecasting: Helps businesses automate budgeting processes. Budget templates are dynamically populated and updated from NetSuite's general ledger and can accommodate changes to accounting segments. In addition, forecasts and reforecasts can be created in minutes, while prebuilt workflows make it easy to track the progress of reviews and approvals.
• Scenario planning: Helps businesses perform scenario modeling and multidimensional planning with any number of NetSuite dimensions, such as location, product, customer, or expense. This simplifies the modelling of complex calculations including projected revenue, operating and capital expenditures, headcount costs, cash flow, and sales without the risk of formula errors posed by regular updates or monthly maintenance.
• Workforce planning: Helps businesses simplify workforce planning elements such as headcount, salary, and compensation planning by aligning the needs and priorities of a business with those of its workforce. This helps ensure short and long-term objectives are met.
• Rolling forecasting: Helps businesses account for and adapt to market changes by producing rolling forecasts against a best-practice framework and enabling users to continuously update a plan.
• Reporting: Helps businesses deliver insightful data and analysis to stakeholders by leveraging pre-built executive dashboards, board reporting packages, and budget vs. actual reports. In addition, Smart View, a Microsoft Office Add-In, provides the ability to integrate NetSuite Planning and Budgeting data directly into Excel, PowerPoint, and Word for ad-hoc reporting and analysis.