Most organisations use several systems to manage their accounting and finances. One system is used for budgeting purposes, another for actual expenditure and a myriad of spreadsheets are used across the business to handle the details. While it is possible to get by with these systems, hosting this information in a single repository can open up a world of efficiency improvements and forecasting capabilities that are otherwise too time-consuming to consider.
Maintenance budgeting systems are no different. Yearly budgets are produced before the start of the next fiscal year, and typically involve multiple sources of information that need to be collated, rearranged, and adapted to the finance system template. To track expenditure against budget, information then needs to be downloaded from the finance system and collated, rearranged, and adjusted again to be manageable by the teams in charge of the budget. If your organization then needs to re-forecast during the year, you go through the whole exercise again. It is time-consuming and can be a major distraction from other priorities.
As a result, it can be challenging to build accurate and trustworthy budgets that can be called upon to impact the reliability and availability of assets positively.
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