On an annual basis, every company goes through the process of creating their capital budget to determine which projects will make the cut. That often involves spreadsheets with data from multiple sources and intensive version control. A stressful time for most finance teams as a company plans its priority initiatives for the year to come. With the rise in digital transformation, new solutions are constantly being developed to remove manual tasks that are disconnected from data sources. By replacing manual tasks with digital workflow solutions executives can make confident decisions faster and smarter based on comprehensive business cases and real-time data. 

Stratex Online is a leading capital budgeting solution, it compares business cases by scoring and ranking them against a pre-determined matrix. By having a single, standardized data source for the capital budget, management teams can select a portfolio of initiatives that maximizes their overall human and funding constraints. 

Define Your Capital Budgeting Process

The first step to improving your capital budgeting process is mapping your current process and understanding the bottlenecks, areas of frustration, accuracy and data sources. By undertaking this exercise you are able to identify areas of significant waste, and opportunities for improvement. By leveraging digital technologies companies are able to obtain more accurate information and make better decisions to get the most from their capital budgets and often gain a competitive advantage. 

How Can Companies Benefit Using Capital Budgeting Software?

1. Improve Decision Making

Using Capital Budgeting Software, decisions can be made confidently, faster and with more accuracy. With the use of business case templates and a comprehensive matrix, project initiatives can be compared side-by-side. It is through unbiased, comparable and information rich project outlines that the best projects can be selected to deliver strategic objectives within funding, resourcing, and risk-management constraints.

2. Better Project Portfolio Selection

Following a rigorous evaluation of project business case proposals, only the selection remains. This is where more sophisticated technology solutions can greatly improve on the traditional spreadsheet method of review and selection. Modern capital budgeting solutions are able to apply portfolio simulation, and artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms, to assist decision-makers to make optimal portfolio selections.

3. Make Better Capital Investment Decisions

To effectively balance the capital project portfolio between maintenance and growth initiatives it involves a multi-dimensional analysis. Managers will need to consider not only the benefits of a project but also urgency and risk to ensure an optimum portfolio. This is where Capital Budgeting Software can set the important parameters for your organization and let the computer do all the heavy lifting.

4. Free Up Your Time

By digitally simplifying your capital budgeting process and automating most of the tasks with capital budgeting software you will have more time to spend on more strategic tasks.  A fully workflow-enabled solution extends beyond portfolio selection to also ensure compliance with an organization’s delegation of authority and other control processes.

5. Quicker Decision Making

A key benefit of digitally transforming the capital budgeting process is the accessibility of consolidated data for real-time analytical purposes. Managers no longer need to wait for a new spreadsheet version, they can immediately evaluate project initiatives by Benefiting Area, Investment Reason, Asset Class, Score, and other important classifications. 

6. Easily Accessible Data

One of the biggest struggles with capital budgeting is finding all the information you need to make a decision. Data is scattered across multiple sources and can be difficult to compile in one place. Capital Budgeting Software provides a single source of truth in real-time giving project participants (initiator, sponsors, managers) the ability to collaborate in real-time at a granular project initiative level. 

Conclusion:

Stratex Online provides a sophisticated Capital Budgeting solution that enables managers to allocate budget confidently to the projects that will matter most. Through better decision making you are able to save time, but most importantly ensure your projects will align to strategic goals.  To learn more about Stratex Online, you can reach out at sales@iqxbusiness.com or +61 2 8007 4799.