How to manage your budget and quickly determine leakage

Overspending and variations from budget estimates are a common occurrence for many businesses. Usually, monitoring these variations requires waiting for the finance team to provide monthly or quarterly reports. A data analytics solution such as Phocas offers the ability to manage your budgets yourself at any time.

By putting yourself in control, you can proactively work with your finance team to explain variances and make adjustments for ongoing success.

See where you are overspending

In this video, we will demonstrate how Phocas users can quickly determine if and where they are overspending. First, you can review a high-level summary of your expense categories such as rent, wages, marketing, printing and so on. Using variance mode enables you to compare your current expenditures to the previous year. In our example, we can see a significant increase in marketing expenses.

From here, we can focus on a detailed view of our various marketing expenses to see if they are within budget for this year. We can do this in just a few clicks by comparing our budget to our profit and loss statement. If we find a discrepancy, we can simply sort our marketing expenses by negative variances to pinpoint where we are overspending our marketing dollars.

In this example, we can see marketing expos has one of the largest negative variances. Armed with this information, we can now investigate why we are overspending for marketing expos and identify ways to trim our expenses in this area. With the ability to monitor your budget in Phocas, you can quickly intervene to stop leaks before they become a significant quarterly loss.