September 14, 2011 – XLerant combines the best of their powerful and flexible budgeting application with the most popular spreadsheet. The company has woven Excel seamlessly inside its popular and powerful budget preparation application to utilize the power and flexibility of both products.

XLerant, Inc., a leading provider of budgeting software for mid-sized organizations, announced the release of myXL, a new capability that provides BudgetPak users the ability to harness the power of Excel.

XLerant’s new myXL is a capability that allows for dynamic read/write capabilities between the BudgetPak database and Excel that allows for:

  • Dynamic, custom reporting
  • Ad-hoc analysis and information retrieval, and
  • Complex, organization-specific calculations and models

With this new capability, BudgetPak users can sit natively in Excel and write reports, perform analysis or write complex calculations in a secured, password-protected environment. This blends the best of the both worlds of powerful and flexible corporate budgeting application software and the most popular spreadsheet.

Dee Boyd, General Ledger Manager for the Baptist General Convention of Texas said “With myXL I can leverage the great analytic and modeling functionality of Excel to quickly analyze just the details I want, and then create dynamic reports for the data that I want to analyze over and over again, within the secure confines of BudgetPak.”

According to XLerant CEO, Ted Dacko, “At XLerant, we are energizing a culture of budget accountability. XLerant understands that there is a direct relationship between participation in the budget process and ownership of the numbers. We strive to make it simple for people to budget for themselves. BudgetPak’s powerful new tool, myXL, will enhance that vision of user accountability.”

Tough Times Make Budgeting Mission Critical
In today’s tough economic times, budgeting is now “mission critical”. There is more scrutiny on the budget process than ever before and executive management is putting the process under the microscope. Organizations are looking for products that provide excellent budget preparation as well as excellent management reporting and analysis.

“Organizations have historically been limited in their budgeting alternatives,” says Charles Pevsner, Co-Founder and Vice President of Development. Pevsner adds, “Transaction vendors, such as general ledger providers, do not understand the nature of account balance applications like budgeting. So these vendors offer very weak budgeting capabilities that have little or no appeal to the department heads who actually have to prepare the budgets. This cripples budget accountability from this critical constituency. So, organizations have migrated to Excel as the budget preparation system. This is not the best use of Excel. Excel is not a database, so all results need to be manually managed and checked for accuracy. Excel is not a programming environment, so building proper budget intelligence functionality is difficult if not impossible. Financial people are not programmers, so their ability to build a structured application is very limited and non-financial people do not love Excel the way financial people do. This is a disaster waiting to happen in most mid-sized companies.”

XLerant combines the best of their powerful and flexible budgeting application with the most popular spreadsheet. The company has woven Excel seamlessly inside its popular and powerful budget preparation application to utilize the power and flexibility of both products. This maximizes what Excel is very good at—calculations, report formatting and analysis—while leaving the heavy lifting of budget preparation and data management to the application itself.

“We built this under the direction of our customers who helped us best understand how they would want to marry these two distinct, but complimentary capabilities into a singular system” says Lawrence Serven, Co-Founder. “The positive reaction from our customers who have used this new capability further justifies our belief that we have maximized our value to them and further improved the Culture of Budget Accountability that we tout.”

“We always aim for providing Finance with the control they require, along with the flexibility users need to feel ownership of the numbers” Says Joanne Brunn, Vice President of Client Services at XLerant, “And myXL is another way we make that happen.”

Plus, this further reduces reliance on IT as customized reporting and analysis can be done dynamically through Excel, directly into the database. Any report, analysis or even report book can be built and any calculation that the customer has already built can be used directly inside the application.

“MyXL is like having my own personal assistant. I get the data I want, in the form I want it, when I want it. Done.” noted Jeff Ginsberg, Director of Fiscal Affairs and Central Services for Bunker Hill Community College, located in Boston, MA and a BudgetPak customer.

MyXL is just one of the features in our latest release that provides finance more control over the process and users more flexibility to do their budget intelligently. MyXL contributes to the importance of supporting a culture of budget accountability.

About XLerant, Inc.

XLerant provides cloud-based budgeting, forecasting and reporting solutions for small to mid-sized organizations — designed for the needs of finance teams and budget managers. XLerant’s non-Excel interface engages budget managers and empowers them to make informed decisions to help achieve strategic objectives. XLerant’s powerful software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution has been recognized for outstanding usability, customer service, and ease of implementation.  For more information, visit www.XLerant.com or follow @XLerant