"The budget and financial reporting processes are well known sources of frustration for most CFOs. Seeking a quick fix to the problem, the common solution is to pour more money into new and better software. This leaves the root cause, the inefficient and dysfunctional underlying processes and routines, unaddressed. As this book shows, substantial and sustainable improvements are only achieved through an holistic approach to process improvement, technology, strategy, and people."
–Tom Henry Knudsen
Executive Vice President, Telenor Eiendom Fornebu AS

Proven methods for improving efficiency

Corporations face a high turnover among financial managers, rapid changes in technology, lack of time and process redesign skills, and ongoing ambiguity about primary objectives behind the budgeting and financial reporting processes. Amid this frenzy, it is the fundamental efficiency of these processes that dramatically impact overall business performance. Process Improvement for Effective Budgeting and Financial Reporting provides financial managers with a compelling blueprint for increasing efficiency and eliminating waste of time and energy. Four operational experts lay out an 80/20 plan–improving 80% of processes in 20% of the time it would take to improve 100%–and explain a Business Process Improvement (BPI) plan that incorporates:

• The emerging trends affecting financial managers today
• Step-by-step process implementation
• Interviews with industry leaders, consultants, and managers who have successfully instituted BPI plans
• Appraisals of the available software that can help or hinder the process

There is no substitute for improved efficiency. CFOs, controllers, budget managers, and financial analysts will significantly benefit from adding this authoritative guide to their professional libraries.

Essential Budget Planning for the 21st Century Corporation

Today’s corporations are more competitive, dynamic, and, consequently, more powerful and successful than ever before. As a result, the days when corporate budgeting was merely an obligatory, routine process of estimating the coming year’s revenues and expenses have long ended. Successful corporations are constantly improving their ability to predict their future operations and their related resource requirements, enabling them to adjust their plans as needed and stay ahead of the competition. Not only does this heighten the importance of the budgeting and planning process, but it also changes the traditional roles of spreadsheets, legacy budget systems, and software created in-house. Budgeting shows corporations how to achieve and maintain their edge through modern budgeting systems and the use of good budgeting software. This book provides comprehensive guidance through the range of considerations that are crucial to streamlining the budget planning process:

• What corporations should be looking for when buying or building a new budgeting solution
• How to select the right budgeting solution from the field of vendors
• How to successfully implement a new budgeting solution
• How to fully utilize the Web

. . . plus helpful lists and questionnaires, and interviews with managers from leading companies who have effectively created internal processes and implemented software solutions. Equip your corporation to excel in the twenty-first century with the tools and information offered in this invaluable resource.

Focusing on designing the right dashboards for use in an organization, this timely, full color book reveals how to successfully deploy dashboards by building the optimal software architecture and dashboard design. In addition, it describes the value of this popular technology to a business and how it can have a significant impact on performance improvement. A unique collection of more than 120 dashboard images are organized by category. One of the chapters provides a step-by-step description of the key performance indicator (KPIs) design process. One of the appendices contains more than 1,000 examples of KPIs to help design the content of dashboards. The book also describes all the steps in a dashboard implementation and offers related advice.

Nils Rasmussen (West Hollywood, CA) is cofounder and Principal of Solver, Inc. Claire Y. Chen (Long Beach, CA) is a Senior Business Intelligence Architect at Solver, Inc. Manish Bansal (Irvine, CA) is Vice President of Sales at Solver, Inc.