XLerant Releases BudgetPak
Corporate Budgeting Software Simplifies Departmental Budget Creation
"BudgetPak is a cost effective way to address the most often cited area of pain in the planning process – departmental budgeting," Lawrence Serven, XLerant.
Stamford, CT, – XLerant (www.XLerant.com), a Stamford-based provider of business performance management software and consulting services for Fortune 1000 companies, has announced the release of BudgetPak, a software tool which uses plain English prompts to guide non-financial managers in developing high quality cost center budgets that meet corporate requirements quickly and easily.
"We are pleased to be an early adopter of BudgetPak because we see the potential to help our non-financial managers get through the budgeting cycle easier, faster and with better results. We saw nothing else as easy and intuitive out there," says William Feher, Controller of Norwalk based EMCOR, a $4 Billion Fortune 500 company. EMCOR implemented BudgetPak for cost center budgeting, along with Hyperion Planning for enterprise-wide operational planning and reporting.
"The next generation of financial software applications, like BudgetPak, integrates business process workflow into the application itself," notes Craig Schiff, CEO of the vendor independent consultancy BPM Partners, and a former senior executive with Hyperion and OutlookSoft. "This is important to gaining organization wide acceptance and winning over nonfinancial users."
BudgetPak
BudgetPak was created by corporate finance professional Lawrence Serven and I/T executive Charles Pevsner, and was developed to accelerate common budgeting tasks, within each user company’s unique budgeting protocols. "Our mission at XLerant is to bring intelligent solutions to common business problems. BudgetPak solves the issue of budget inconsistency throughout a company’s many departments by creating a common decision tree and then capturing the individual management decisions that actually drive costs," notes Serven. "It’s a corporate budgeting software tool which simplifies departmental budget creation."
XLerant’s CIO Charles Pevsner, puts a human face on the problem. "Ask a typical line manager who has to put together a cost center budget and they’ll tell you that it’s a distraction from their real job, and they often don’t even know where to begin the process. We call that ‘the tyranny of the blank spreadsheet.’ Budgeting is stressful for everyone from the front line manager creating the budget to the senior leaders who have to sign off on it." Using BudgetPak, a CFO/Controller can compare dollar budgets, but can also examine the decisions that drove those costs, as well as make certain that corporate requirements and budget item cost parameters are met. The software tool is compatible with all enterprise planning solutions, including SAP, PeopleSoft, Hyperion, Cognos, Comshare and the world’s most widely used tool for budgeting -- Excel.
BudgetPak enables business leaders to improve profitability by effectively directing financial planning and controlling financial performance, what XLerant calls "informed cost control." Executives can more tightly define and control the budget process – achieving more accurate results in a shorter time, with true visibility into departmental budget details and assumptions. For more information on XLerant’s products and services, please contact them at info@Xlerant.com or by calling (203) 328 3738.
XLerant is a Stamford, Connecticut based software company launched in November 2004. BudgetPak is priced at $800 per seat basis and can typically be implemented in four to six weeks.