IT&I Magazine No. 21 - Edition October 2015

Imagine the following situation: the annual accounts! The Contract Accounting department is already under enormous stress, and then this happens – the layouts for analysing receivables for the individual value adjustment are accidently deleted. The co-worker who set them up is off sick. Your colleagues meticulously reconstruct the settings, and then start the laborious task of transferring the data to Excel and analysing the receivables. The export and manual analysis are another frequent source of errors, and constant comparison is required.

Each year, a veritable budgeting marathon starts in German companies. Countless Excel files circulate throughout the various departments until, finally, they are laboriously consolidated and subjected to a plausibility check. Reliable business planning provides a quick overview of the anticipated costs for the individual cost centres in the coming periods, and is therefore an essential prerequisite for standard costing.