Budgeting & Forecasting

Budgets are estimates of future performance and preparing a comprehensive budget requires forecasts for a number of categories – sales, production, material usage, labor and factory overhead. For process manufacturers, product costs are a key component that affects all of these areas.

Setting standard costs is one of the most protracted undertakings of any budget process. Most companies have thousands of SKUs and each one has an assigned standard cost. By cloning the current year standards model and manipulating the cost factors to determine the next year’s costs, a process that normally takes months of manual roll-ups is accomplished in weeks. Since ImpactECS tightly integrates with ERP and data warehouses, once the new standards are approved they are automatically loaded and ready for transactional systems at the start of the new fiscal period. And as time passes, it’s easy to update standards as market conditions change.

Another critical component in budgeting is building rates for process and cost centers to allocate overhead. With ImpactECS, you can define an unlimited number of overhead categories, or buckets, to provide a fully-loaded cost view for each unique product.