Odoo is predominantly a transaction processing system. Whilst Odoo does offer some budgeting capability with its “out of the box” offering, the functionality in this area is somewhat limited. Many businesses resort to producing their budgets and forecasts in Excel which then leads to their actual management reporting also being produced in Excel.
Challenges
- A business may be running multiple stores, engage with thousands of customers across multiple channels, and sell hundreds or even thousands of different products and their associated variants.
- A business may also like to undertake detailed analysis of "Actual vs. Budget vs. Reforecast" at these more detailed levels of granularity which cannot be easily achieved in an Excel spreadsheet.
- Many organisations employ multiple sales representatives across various regions, channels and product ranges, who would like to set budgets and reforecasts for each representative’s area of responsibility.
- Whilst management may set an initial budget/reforecast using specific parameters (top down), they may like to invite their sales representatives responsible for delivering on a segment of the proposed budget/forecast to finesse the outcomes based on their innate knowledge of their territory (bottom – up).
- After setting an initial budget, a business may want to undertake multiple revision or reforecasts, as the year progresses, to take into account changes in customer buying habits, the occurrence of a pandemic, or the inability to source or produce particular products.
- Whilst most company's budget and reforecast sales, many seldom break their budget/reforecast into price and volume. Breaking a budget/reforecast down into price and volume outcomes provides significant insights unachievable by simply looking at sales dollars.
- A business may want to compare actual results against a budget or reforecast at this detailed level to identify non-performing products or customers that they should perhaps be devoting less time to.
- The fact that there are many variables impacting the achievement of planned business outcomes, causes the majority of budgets and forecasts to be outdated well and truly prior to their expected outcome date.
I&A positions with Essatto which is fully integrated with Odoo through its pre built connector to deliver comprehensive budgeting and forecasting, aggregates ALL of the businesses data including Odoo into a central Data Analytics platform and provides streamlined reporting to save a business time and value add by helping to uncover cost savings and revenue opportunities.
ESSATTO KEY FEATURES
- "One Click" management reporting through the integration of your existing Excel management reporting pack
- Multi-scenario budgeting and forecasting
- Multi-dimensional actual vs. budget vs. reforecast performance and variance analysis including by entity, customer, product, district, store, responsibility centre and sales representative.
- The ability to integrate Odoo data with data coming from other sources
- A simplified consolidation module that facilitates "consolidation-of-actual", as well as budget/reforecast data, accounting for minority interests and foreign currency impacts.
- Extensive reporting and dashboarding including “live-link” excel read, writeback, and web dashboards and reports.
- Also being delivered in the next release of Essatto, is a comprehensive "forecast cash flow" capability that takes into account expected future flows derived from Odoo as well as future flows that are not reflected in Odoo, such as "cashflow impacts of projected sales".
