InetSoft Webinar: Demo of a Web Based Financial Planning Solution

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Web Based Reporting, Budgeting, and Forecasting." The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

This is a demo of the Web based financial planning solution. This is a simplified view, but when I log on, you are going to notice that it’s asking me to log in with my user name and password, so here is my single point of entry. This is all Web based. I come into the system and it provides me the simplistic view to start out. Here it’s going to provide me only the information that I have the rights to see within my organization. So in that little simple view, we have a Web app it shows me five categories here.

It shows me my hotel’s actual, my hotel’s budget. It shows me my budget. This would be my forecast, and then it splits it out. In this example, I have a hotel, and I have a casino so actually my casino managers fill in their revenue piece. I have additional information that I can see. That’s three buttons across the screen. I can actually go into specific years or periods. I can go into multiple locations. Maybe I actually manage not only in this example, London City but Piccadilly in London House.

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I might be able to see all of those locations. In addition, we are going to notice from these budget scenarios is the fact that I have really an unlimited number of versions or scenarios. Here in the casino I have a budget and a target and a forecast I am going to come back here to the hotel. I actually have more tiers within the hotel infrastructure in that I have budget passes, standard two and three, revised forecast and ruling forecast.

We are in a Web based infrastructure. I didn’t have the e-mail anything to anybody. I just simply logged on to the account. I didn’t have to accept an e-mail or upload an excel template, worry about version issues or anything like that. I just logged on to the Web app, and this was what was waiting for me which is my budget worksheet that is already populated.

Now where that data that populates this worksheet comes from is entirely up to you as the customer. It could be last year numbers. We could round them. There is virtually anything we could do, but the first thing to note is that we are in an environment very similar to a spreadsheet, a grid form that allows entry. So I come into this cell, and I put five million, and I hit enter you are going to notice that my totals all propagate throughout. The idea is hopefully you can eliminate work and errors right there because of the fact that we have to use an external application, and people can just log on to the Web and start entering this budget information.

Let's talk little bit about the application, itself. Again it has populated the view. The number of rows that someone sees is entirely up to them. If I am the casino manager, and I want to come in and enter just the casino activity, then all I see here is the casino revenue. If I don’t want a 100,000, I enter 150,000 for January and hit enter. When I am done with all of my data entry, you will see over here that I can go ahead and save my work in process. That actually goes back to the database, and from this point on when I come back that data will always be there. It is actually consolidated up in to the database, so that 150 number is now safe.

Hotel Budgeting Dashboard

I am going to bounce around a little bit and come back to the hotel because I want to talk about some of the budgeting tools. We have tools to help people fill in their budgets. The idea is that if I want to do commercial promotions, and I don’t want to waste the time to enter all 12 months. I know what my numbers for the year are, we have a tool called phasing. And what phasing does it allows me to allocate across months.

I am just going through this simple example of an even spread, and I am going to say under budget $12,000 for this item, and I am going to say okay, and that phasing tool is going to take that $12,000 over the period which I highlighted, and it is going to spread that evenly. Now we can populate phasing with just a variety of scenarios again including last year’s spread and things like that. That facilitates the entry of the budget.

When I am done, I can save this. We also have a financial planning tool that if I did want to take this home or take this on the road or I want to work on it from the plane, I download this into an excel report. We can simply hit this excel function. It is going to load this worksheet in to excel for me, and then I can take that with me and work on it. We actually have tools where you can connect to this Excel spreadsheet as a database at a later point.

So this is a very simple scenario and once I have tried to enter everything I can come over here to my hotel actuals, and I can actually get a financial report. I can choose actual against budget, or whatever I would like to see in order to facilitate me getting my entry in, but that’s an easy one. What I like to do is take it to the next level and go into an example of more of a Web based budgeting infrastructure. So I am going to go ahead and hit enter here.

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