Budgeting is complex, time consuming and tedious: historical data needs to be analyzed, projections must be developed and actual spending data needs to be captured and compared with the budget. To make matters worse, budgets must straddle two different worlds. On the one hand, the accounting world cares about general ledger accounts, tax deductibility, accruals and amortization. On the other hand, marketers care about campaigns, jobs, products, events, brands, and media.

While spreadsheets are the obvious choice for projecting and 'what if-ing', they are poor when things get very complex; are very error-prone (with disastrous consequences), require lots of tedious and time consuming maintenance, formulas tend to "break," can't be updated by multiple users at the same time, and require constant data entry of 'actuals.' MarketingPilot's integrated budget management features eliminate all of these issues.

Benefits

• Save time.
• Improve accuracy.
• Information is always accurate and up-to-date.
• Information is secure.
• Make better decisions.
• Go back and forth to Accounting easily.
• Drill-down to the budget and actual details.

Features

• Create an unlimited number of budgets.
• Never rekey expenses, revenue, purchase orders, media orders or bookings.
• No formulas to update.
• No spreadsheets to keep linked.
• Create budgets for projects, clients, jobs, campaigns and roll them up into an overall budget.
• Make daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual, fiscal or seasonal budgets.
• View budgets in a variety of ways:
  • by expense account.
  • By day, week, month, quarter, year, fiscal year or season.
  • Versus actual expenses.
  • Versus actual and projected expenses.
  • Maintain multiple budgets for a project or period.
  • Automatically handle accruals: click a button and see the effect of all open Purchase Orders on the budget.
  • Click a button to add bookings to the budget.
  • Multiple users can update budget and actual information at the same time.
  • Different users can create parts of a budget and automatically roll-up their work into a consolidated budget.
  • Security options prevent unauthorized access to budget information.
  • Supporting documentation and working papers can be stored in MarketingPilot and be linked to the budget.
  • Annotate budgets with notes.