Centage: Maestro of Budgeting Solutions

Budgeting in Excel is a bear. It is a tedious and time-consuming process, in which companies typically end up passing around spreadsheets that can generate multiple iterations and become hard to reconcile,” saysBarry Clapp, President and COO of Centage—a leading provider of automated budgeting and forecasting software solutions.

Headquartered in Natick, MA, Centage develops software that helps its clients achieve unprecedented accuracy and efficiency in their financial planning and reporting processes. The company’s easy-to-use and scalable budgeting, planning, and forecasting solutions allow small to mid-market firms to automate many of their time-consuming and error-prone activities associated with spreadsheet budgeting, and generate accurate budgets and forecasts.

The Maestro suite is made up of three integrated solutions. Their flagship product, Budget Maestro ® is a giant leap beyond spreadsheets; this software delivers extraordinary efficiency, deep visibility and increased agility to help their clients manage financial health of their organization. By simplifying the task of data collection, with built-in GAAP compliant business and financial logic via wizards, spread methods, and drop-down menus, Budget Maestro dramatically shortens budget cycle time as well as improves accuracy and relevance of results. It’s also the only solution that provides integrated projected cash flow, income statement and balance sheet statements that reflect your plans, what-if-scenarios, and actuals.

Analytics Maestro, an integral module of the Maestro suite, offers users a clear graphic representation of gaps between budget and actual data to help drive better decision making and increased accountability throughout the organization. It allows users the ability to create their own visual dashboards and reports with the most relevant, accurate, and up-to-date information, customized to meet their changing needs. The solution facilitates self-serve analytics and reporting by empowering users to refresh reports on-demand and drill-down to detail, eliminating the need for external consultants or

IT support. The third module of the suite, Link Maestro, offers bi-directional integration with your ERP/General Ledger, allowing users to seamlessly load budget and forecast versions from your G/L into Budget Maestro, preserving their existing chart of accounts and structure.

Budgeting in Excel is a tedious, time-consuming and error prone process

These integrated solutions enable Centage to provide its clients, unprecedented visibility into their key activities that are driving financial statements. Talking about the benefits of Centage’s products customer Daniel Lien, general manager at the Office of Strategic Management, Wagner Asia said, “Like many companies, Wagner Asia relied on spreadsheets as its ‘budgeting software’. With Budget Maestro we were able to overcome the usual headaches of budgeting with spreadsheets—challenges consolidating budgets, questionable data, broken macros, and writing formulas to develop a comprehensive budget in a matter of weeks, instead of what previously took months.” Link Maestro enabled us to deploy seamless data integration, secure datatransfer, and automate import of the resources at any time to plan, budget and forecast. It eliminated the potential for human error, importing, and keying numbers. In addition, the unprecedented level of granularity offered by the tool, allowed us to dig deep into our individual divisions, gain valuable insight, and more strategically manage the business,” he adds.

Moving forward, Centageaims to simplify the tools that it offers and continue to enhance the user experience, making it easier for non-financial users to contribute to the budget process and see the impact of their recommendations as they are making them. Centage also plans to venture into cloud solutions and expand its business intelligence expertise so that more people can drill through and carry out better analysis of their actual performance whether in the home office, at a customer, or on the road.