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Budget forecasting possibilities in D365 F&O

08-09-2023
From Excel files iterations to a fully integrated budget process leveraging AI and D365 F&O standard features.

Improving and leveraging budgeting processes is becoming increasingly important to anticipate the future better and monitor activities. Perfectly knowing day-to-day business constraints but also best breeds tools, procedures, and practices.

Urgent needs of data

Knowing the present and the past is essential to anticipate the future better. For companies, it is mainly materialized by figures and the reporting process. Especially on the budget side, where you have to know what happened and what is happening to try to figure out what will happen. Especially in today’s very changing context.

To do so, it’s not only important to collect, process, store, and analyze data. But now it will be essential to do it cleanly with the maximum amount of data. As with machine learning and AI, the more data you have, the better possibilities it will bring.

Given the advent of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the accrual of a larger volume of data corresponds directly to the augmentation of optimal opportunities that can be harnessed.

Bart van Strijen

Partner, Microsoft Transformation

KPMG Switzerland

Benjamin Rondot

KPMG Switzerland

D365 F&O “standard” budget possibilities

Through their alliance and collaboration, KPMG and Microsoft facilitate the realization of an effective budgetary process for clients, harnessing the capabilities inherent in D365 F&O functionalities.

These are the first “well-known” steps. Covering budget construction (in or out of D365) and implementing best practices for the customer to achieve their goals through solutions and processes implemented.

Improving the way figures are built, especially when multiple sources of data are needed coming from different teams in the company or additional tools. Keeping in mind that figures need always to be relevant, accurate, delivered on time, and easily maintainable.

This allows to have one central point where figures are built and stored. Then, all reporting possibilities can be used to leverage those figures (BI, day-to-day reporting, dashboards, and workspaces).

Next steps – designing the future

Using D365 F&O as an ERP, you are fully integrated into the Microsoft environment. With continuous releases and upgrades, you can benefit from all new features in your solution without other additional costs than implementation ones (Analyze, Configure, Test, Deploy).

The latest enhancements in the Finance Insights add-in empower users to craft intelligent budget proposals. By harnessing machine learning capabilities, D365 F&O can provide an advanced budget suggestion informed by sophisticated predictive analyses.

So, finance responsible can build their budget figures entirely using the latest technologies and possibilities offered in the solution.

The biggest constraint is that finance managers must keep learning how new tools and technologies evolve, but mainly to define clear functional guidelines, what they want to track and monitor, how they want their team to work, how they can leverage all offered possibilities, and more.

It seems now that the question will not only be “How to use AI and the latest technologies best?" but also, "Who will use it the best?”.