Module: Budgeting

USL Financials excels in this area because of the seamless integration with MS Office. Since all the screens and reports are in MS Access and the database is MS SQL Server, USL Financials operates as a subset of MS Office. The user can easily flow from General Ledger, Budgeting, to MS Excel, Access, Word, etc. With the latest version of MS SQL Server, Microsoft has implemented an On-line Analytical Process (OLAP) which provides a "slice and dice" capability of financial information directly from MS Excel.

From MS Excel, a user can access all the financial actual and budget information, analyze it and through the USL import functions, post it back to the general ledger. Virginia Economic Development Partnership, a USL client, populates a set of departmental spreadsheets with last year's actual expenditures, last years budget in a protected area, and the Director of Finance proposes a budget to each department manager. The Department manager then allocates those dollars to the accounts in his/her department. The departmental spreadsheet is linked to the directors consolidated totals, and they are imported back into one of the working budgets.

Public Sector BEST Budgeting/Planning Module is a public sector-wide, purpose-built budgeting and planning application. With the Public Sector BEST Budgeting/Planning Module, you’ll make better, more informed decisions by shortening the budgeting and planning cycles. And, with a planning process that is easier and more efficient, you’ll be able to encourage collaboration across departments and tie budgeting activities to performance.

The Public Sector BEST Budgeting/Planning Module lets you take control of the Budgeting and Planning process.  Free yourself from the time-consuming spreadsheet mechanics and focus on strategic budgeting and planning.

Utilize bottom-up or top-down budgeting processes—or a combination of both.
Whether you need to allocate a cost target or projection from the top down, or consolidate several different budget plans from the bottom up, Best! Imperativ Active Planner accommodates your organizational structure and provides a purpose-built solution.

Encourage budget collaboration across the enterprise.
Strong management capabilities allow for seamless integration of budget submissions from multiple departments, using “Plan Sheets” that have a familiar spreadsheet look and feel.

Integrate your budget with enterprise data sources.
Once your system is set up, Best! Imperativ Active Planner automatically integrates financial information from your general ledger. You can also calculate and deploy values from other data sources including SQL Server, Access, Dbase, Excel, FoxPro and any ODBC or OLE-DB compliant database.

Automatically update users on activity in the planning process.
Using e-mail notification, critical information is sent to the appropriate reviewer or budget administrator as the status of the plan changes. Transfer information directly from the source. You can insert rows into a Plan Sheet directly from your chart of accounts or using any other enterprise data. Includes Full Position Based Budgeting.