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Lawson Software has announced the general availability of its Budgeting & Planning 9 software. The company designed the application (based on software it acquired with Closeloop Solutions) to integrate easily with its core systems, such as Lawson General Ledger and Lawson Human Capital Management (HCM). The software can be used with any other general ledger and enterprise applications as well, but Ventana Research expects most purchasers to use it with these systems.

In general, Ventana Research urges companies to spend more time in planning and less time budgeting. Planning is a process aimed at deciding on a set of objectives (financial and nonfinancial) and establishing the resources (people, purchased parts, third-party services, advertising, and so on) needed to achieve those objectives. Budgeting is the narrower process of calculating the monetary implications of these objectives and resources. Today, most companies do “budgetingandplanning,” where the plan is implicit in the budget, which we assert limits the usefulness of the exercise. For most midsize or large companies, the necessary first step in moving beyond “budgetingandplanning” is to stop using stand-alone spreadsheets for the annual budget and start using a dedicated application designed for planning and budgeting. We advise companies that use Lawson’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) or HCM applications to evaluate its new budgeting and planning software as a foundation for transforming this process

Related Research Notes:
Finance Must Play a Role in Sales and Operations Planning
Research shows top companies regularly merge financial outlook with sales and operational plans

Plan While You Can
Seize the opportunity to adopt driver-based planning

Planning and Budgeting Remains Immature
Few companies have tied it to performance management