Budgeting with Writeback
Posted on August 20, 2024 | By Admin
The process of budgeting, an instrument of fiscal discipline and accountability has evolved from the times of its
introduction in late 1700s in the public domain and later in the 20th century in the backdrop of industrialization.
Companies of all sizes have taken to preferred methods and technologies to conduct this exercise – from
manual excels to systems that can aid workflows, integrate business planning, help conduct what-if analysis and
what not.
Today, the concept of continuous planning with real-time data availability has become an inevitable part of any
serious budgeting process. In the world of data and analytics too, planners need mechanisms to make live
updates to multiple enterprise systems or apps, alter data without having to be switch applications or worry
about accuracies or delays. The ability to update, explore data and make decisions within their analytical context
is crucial.
Let’s take a case of budgeting in a US-based grower, an industry in the US that contributes to roughly 5.6% of its
GDP and has the following pertinent questions:
- How do you balance allocation of budgets based on weightages (derived from historic data)?
- How do you modify budgets and analyse impact at aggregate levels or unit levels?
- How do you use live data to take actions?
The writeback experience with SenseOps
Let’s explore this case in particular with a simplified experience for budget planners. The SenseOps writeback
extension not only allows for real-time data inputs from within Qlik Sense applications, synchronizing updates
across multiple sources – it also makes the exploration and analysis simple.
The extension itself relies on a widget-like user interface to make it easy for users of all types (business and
power users alike) to build their own writeback table and map fields from their table to those in the source
databases. Know more about it.
How it works
A key consideration in enabling the budgeting process is in simplifying the otherwise back and forth, complex
process.
- Direct, contextual inputs: No more storing data manually, creating a connection, retrieving it to view in Qlik Sense. Users directly input budgets from their application and store data in desired format and path for future retrieval and analysis.
- Dynamic Splitting: In dealing with budgets across products/ categories or any metric , the ‘split’ feature helps in dynamically calculating weightage of the factors involved and assigning values in the budgeting hierarchy. Factors may include product sales over time/ for a period, market trends/ seasonality, events and more. Ex: A $125K budgetary spend for the category of Vegetables split across Tomatoes, Broccoli, Artichokes, Beans can be viewed as a cascaded allocation. A pre-calculated weightage of 0.5, 0.2, 0.2, 0.1 has been assumed
- Room for adjustments : Modifying budgets at granular levels (in this case – products) is another common scenario enabled for planning with inputs from field teams, management or partners. While manually altering an existing split here, planners can choose to override the weightages allocated for products or increase/ decrease budget overlays at the aggregate (in this case – Category).
Live updates allow users to explore how totals get rolled up or rolled down, depending on where
modifications are done. Planners can rely on historic data, dynamic or manual weightages to form their
budgeting model across any scale of data involving variables. More importantly, there’s flexibility to
explore from within Qlik Sense applications and with the extension, trigger workflows – including
notifications, actions (native to Qlik and more) – to keep up pace in a competitive world
For a live experience of your budgeting process with SenseOps, write to us, schedule a demo or try it
yourself
