Seducing Users - XLerant

Seducing Users to Improve the Budget Process

In today’s world of software, people are used to being seduced by personal applications that make things simplistic…like Google or Facebook. They now expect that business software will follow suit. Wikipedia defines seduction as the process of deliberately enticing, corrupting, persuading, or inducing a person to engage in behavior. The word seduction stems from Latin…    Read More

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Businessman Confusion - XLerant

Excel in Budgeting – Friend or Foe?

Most organizations still use Microsoft Excel as their budget preparation tool. The reason for this is that the general ledger or ERP providers don’t focus on, or even understand, the budget process or budget workflow and do not think about this from the perspective of the average user or institution. So, financial people took matters…    Read More

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Proactive and Reactive - XLerant

Accounting for Special Projects: Budgeting for Strategic Initiatives

To state the obvious: budgeting is complex. Budgeting for strategic initiatives or accounting for special projects makes it even more so. Sometimes you want your department heads to submit their own initiatives and other times you want to dictate to departments which initiatives they need to budget for. But either way – you always want…    Read More

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Budget to Strategy - XLerant

Documentation, Justification & Communication: Key Ingredients for Budgeting to Strategy

Ultimately your budget needs to be a numerical expression of the strategic plan. At XLerant, we believe the best way to align your budget to strategy is to reach out to the people on the front-lines – your employees!  But when your budgeting process engages multiple participants across the organization it becomes as much an…    Read More

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Employee Suggestion - XLerant

When the Employee Suggestion Box Meets Budgeting…

Remember the employee suggestion box? There might still be some relics mounted on a wall somewhere with a stack of paper and pencils nearby.   Can you imagine being the person responsible for translating all of those anonymous, one-to-two sentence thoughts into actionable organizational improvements? Today of course, technology is lending a hand.  A quick search…    Read More

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Cube - XLerant

Top 5 Benefits of Multi-participant Budgeting

Group projects. A uniquely painful experiment that many of us try to avoid at all cost… Two-way communication between team members is often a challenge. Someone (or several “someones”) are perpetually behind and need to be coaxed along. There’s always formatting variations in the final document (no matter how clearly you established guidelines up front)….    Read More

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Door key with blank card among other ones - XLerant

Budgeting Persona: Finding the “Right-Fit”

As a software company we’re constantly striving to find that “right-fit” – something that builds in all the important complexities of budgeting yet seems effortless and simple. In order to make a software solution that truly excels in usability – we have to match the needs, style, and thought-processes of our customer’s organizational and budgeting…    Read More

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