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CrunchBoards cash v budget forecast
CrunchBoards
New CrunchBoards forecasting tools

CrunchBoards beefs up consolidated forecasts

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24th Aug 2016
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UK add-on developer CrunchBoards celebrated last week’s Xerocon USA with an update that strengthened the application’s consolidation and cashflow forecasting capabilities.

The CrunchBoards August update was trumpeted in a series of blogs highlighting different enhancements, and a 20-minute video overview. The additional features reflect the challenge facing any reporting and analysis tool of balancing flexibility and sophistication with ease of use. This is a quick summary of how CrunchBoards explained the changes:

Grouping and ordering

To make the additional features more accessible, CrunchBoards added grouping and ordering tools to its chart of accounts view. When settting up an organisation in CrunchBoards, users now have the option to click accounts and move them into a new or existing group. This can also be done on the fly by dragging and dropping accounts and groups, with the changes immediately reflected across CrunchBoards “cards”, forecasts and reports.

Drill-down scenarios

In its last release, the developer added scenario cards and to make them more immediately relevant, users are now able to drill down into the source data for forward looking projections, even if those forecasts are replicated on a different card.

Consolidated Reporting 

The application now offers a consolidated overview option that can be populated by clicking a list of the company’s supported within the application. It will even call in accounts data from different accounting engines such as Xero and QuickBooks Online. The program will create a consolidated chart of accounts, with multiple options for the user to configure it the way they want. The current version consolidates in a single currency, but CrunchBoards says it is working on a multi-currency option.

New benchmarking tool

The August update also includes a “beta” test benchmarking option that applies the functionality of the existing CrunchBoards tracking tool available to any performance measure within the system. This could be done at consolidated group level, or by picking specific groups in the accounts. Accounts or KPIs can be added from the program’s Formula library.

Cashflow Cards

This enhanced forecasting tool defaults to a view of transactional income and expenditure accounts to give readymade projections of the cash situation, but the projections can be tweaked or different groups can be picked up to look at cash flows in different parts of the business.

The add-on reporting market is highly competitive and can sometimes be characterised as a functionality arms race between the developers. But as Microsoft has found in previous generations within this sector, adding new features to a powerful tool can be self-defeating if users aren’t aware of them or find them difficult to configure.

CrunchBoards is clearly aware of these dangers, and the way it has enhanced the core product (and publicisied the changes) indicates that it is not just listening to its growing user base, but giving them what they want.

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