Set up a solid collaboration process with access security
Budgeting and reporting are fundamental to pushing responsibility to line managers and facilitating collaboration. Here's how the process should work...
- User access — The planning staff sets up the templates that line managers use for sales and expense budgets. With spreadsheets, links to activity drivers in the templates often don't work across department and product workbooks. ("This file contains links to other workbooks..." Sound familiar?) In Alight, the plan administrator sets up users with visibility to only permitted information; links still work across functional areas. The administrator can also set up Key Measures groups with security access, incorporating the most important inputs and metrics for individual users.
- True bottoms up — Plan structures include administrator maintained line items with links for payroll taxes, benefits, headcount driven expenses, and more. In addition, users can create their own line items that capture valuable thinking below natural class accounts — e.g. it's not just a travel budget; it's travel for conferences, travel for customer visits, etc. With Alight, users can be locked out of admin controlled line items but still be assigned variable levels of privileges for creating their own line items.
- Consolidating user inputs should be seamless. With spreadsheets, however, templates come back with broken links and overwritten formulas making consolidation a grueling task. Alight consolidation is seamless, protecting input variables and linked relationships.
- Audit trails/process controls — The two most feared questions in financial planning are: "Where did that number come from?" and "Why did that number change?" Spreadsheets don't provide audit trails and process controls. Alight does: reporting on the status of each user during the budget process; tracking of line item changes by time stamp, user name and color coding; system generated notes with tracking of object based links; and flagged user generated notes at the line item level.
