American Society of Agronomy (ASA) is a public, scientific society that is located in Madison, Wisconsin. It shares common interests with several companies. Society has the objective of protecting natural resources to produce food while maintaining the environment. It has tremendously evolved since its inception thus modifying its products and services to its members.
Budgeting and Financial management are the most challenging processes for support by technology. However, ASA utilizes technology in its finance and budgeting processes. However, the technology employed is not appropriate to cope with the current competition due to technological developments. The organization uses a spreadsheet, Microsoft Excel. Although it is particularly suitable in data entry work, which is mandatory in budgeting and calculations involved in financial issues, it has several limitations. It is restricted to individual productivity rather than collaborative application. Therefore, it is difficult for users to work on the same databases at the same time, and create links between files that are in different locations. Also, Excel does not possess some features that would be essential in budgeting, especially, in statistical calculations needed for long-term planning.
Technological Solutions
A key strategy to the successful application of technological solutions in any organization’s finance and budgeting systems, is to change the systems, so as they can fit the proposed software. (Keown, 2002) This implies that it is wise to modify most of the organization’s financial processes to a form that is supported by the software rather than trying to customize the software to fit in the organizations’ processes. Therefore, the most appropriate solutions that are applicable to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of finance and budget processes of ASA are spreadsheet-like user interface and corporate performance management (CPM) software.
Spreadsheet-like user Interface: This software allows a wide range of data manipulation. It can execute simultaneously with other data functions on the same data. It is cheap and readily available in many IT Institutions.
Corporate performance management: It is Analytical software constructed with features, which could integrate other transactional modules, such as accounting. The software is designed for analytical purposes and is fixed with models that can store data in formats that allow easy accessibility, as well as improving the speed of transaction processes.
Implications
The spreadsheet-like user interfaces facilitate easy accessibility of data and thus minimize the complications that normally arise when compiling and analyzing reports during the season of creating budgets. Besides, it provides an interface that makes budget solutions implementation work concurrently with other elements of financial management systems. This is a key requirement for many governments and public organizations to drive their choice of financial management systems or budgeting requirements.
Corporate performance management software has several positive implications. It creates a mechanism to execute cost and performance analysis in detail at all levels of an organization. This is facilitated by its ability to store data appropriately thus providing detailed access to information regarding cost and services. It also creates a link between the planning of information with other essential systems required for budget execution. (Karanagh & Shayne, 2009) CPM also improves consolidation in budgeting processes across all levels of the organization. Its functionality allows the department concerned with finance and budgeting to control the development of the budget and regulate its different versions.
References
Karanagh M. & Shayne C. (2009). Budgeting Technology: A private Sector Solution for an enduring public sector problem. New York: City Press.
Keown A. (2002). Foundations of Finance: The Logic and Practice of Financial Management. Pennsylvania: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.