Numbers get revised. Systems providing source information change. Data fed to the system is dirty and needs to be revised. Many organizations think that if they have an accounting system, they have a budgeting system. We distinguish between a budget development process and budget reporting process.
Most accounting systems have the ability to report on budgets vs. actuals.
What they are bad at doing is helping people develop their budgets. In contrast, ARM can provide a step by step friendly approach to budget development that is more than a spreadsheet. We can mix question and answer interactions with collection of tabular data. Manually input data can be combined with information sourced from other systems and in many cases automatic projections can be the starting point for users. This next section describes how a company sets up a budgeting or performance reporting model.