NATICK, Mass., Feb. 17, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Centage™ Corporation, a leading provider of budgeting and forecasting software (Budget Maestro™) for small and medium sized businesses, today unveiled Budget Maestro 7.6. The latest version of the flagship product extends the business and operational logic already built into the system and broadens it with customizable drivers for key modules of Budget Maestro (Revenue, Personnel, and Operating Expenses, etc.). This new functionality further automates revenue, cost, and capacity planning making the budget model easier to build and maintain. The latest enhancements open the value of Budget Maestro to many new use cases and larger customers. In particular, it is of value to financial professionals in industries such as healthcare and manufacturing, where the ability to customize planning scenarios based on specific parameters is paramount to their success.
Unlike its competitors, Budget Maestro features extensive built-in business and financial intelligence designed to free customers from the limitations of spreadsheet-based financial planning. Budget Maestro 7.6 extends the value of this unique functionality by enabling customers to easily replicate or reuse the newly created drivers throughout the system to create similar planning or forecasting scenarios. Spreadsheet-based solutions and competitive systems require the development of complex formulas in order to optimize these kinds of metrics.
According to Gartner's recent report, Market Guide for Specialty Corporate Planning Applications,* "There has been a distinct increase in anticipated initiatives in support of more-granular strategic financial planning... The cloud, IMC and more-powerful embedded analytics are providing new opportunities to significantly improve the corporate planning process, to more effectively optimize organizational performance and guide strategic direction. This will become more important as competitive pressures necessitate the use of real-time feedback provided by customers, Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices and other sources for corporate planning. The office of finance must re-evaluate these competencies within the context of new possibilities enabled by a wide variety of planning solutions."
The latest version of Budget Maestro also features significant enhancements and formatting options to its presentation reporting. These updates increase integration with ExcelÔ to leverage its built-in formatting and charts, as well as offering more report distribution options. This functionality is critical to today's financial professionals, who are often called upon to collaborate with all parts of the business to execute strategic financial decisions in real-time.
"Many of our healthcare customers, for example, want to create planning scenarios around specific things like number of patient beds, days in a month, percentage occupied, and staffing ratios. Empowering our customers with the ability to predefine these metrics across revenue, operating expenses and personnel modules allows them to plan using the language of their business rather than relying on generic assumptions," said Chris Howard, Vice President of Customer Experience at Centage. "Customers in the manufacturing industry have similar requirements around units per case, cases per pallet, and pallets per truck. Being able to extend those metrics across hiring drivers and capital expense planning for equipment, gives customers a strategic advantage when it comes to anticipating the cash and resources required to grow their businesses."
About Centage
Budget Maestro® by Centage is an easy-to-use, scalable, automated budgeting, planning, and forecasting application. It is designed for small- to mid-market companies and automates many of the time-consuming and error-prone activities associated with using spreadsheets to generate accurate budgets and forecasts. It features built-in financial and business logic that allow users to create and update their budgets and forecasts and never worry about formulas, functions, links or any custom programming. It is the only solution in the market that offers synchronized P &L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow reporting that generate automatically and update seamlessly. Budget Maestro serves more than 7,000 users worldwide. Visit us at www.centage.com. For more information, follow us on Twitter @Centage or visit our blog http://blog.centage.com/ for the latest insights on budgeting and forecasting strategies.
Disclaimer
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*Gartner, "Market Guide for Specialty Corporate Planning Applications," written by Christopher Iervolino and John E. Van Decker. December, 3, 2015.