Gloucester Council Implements ABS Forecasting System
Gloucester City Council has implemented a budgeting and forecasting system from Advanced Business Solutions (ABS). The software has helped the council to reduce its budget loading time from 10 days to just minutes and to better monitor, evaluate and improve its financial performance by replacing spreadsheets.
Janet Parrott, financial planning accountant at Gloucester City Council, said: “It used to take several members of the finance team over a week to complete their budget loading by collating information from various Excel spreadsheets. This process was extremely inefficient, prone to errors and didn’t provide us with an accurate picture of our finances.”
The web-based budgeting and forecasting system, which has been integrated into Gloucester City Council’s existing ABS financial management system, enables the creation and real-time monitoring of financial plans and forecasts. Budgetary information can be quickly extracted, consolidated and reported to authorised users, eliminating time-consuming manual processes and the consolidation of spreadsheets.
Parrott said: “ABS’ system has significantly streamlined our budgeting processes and made it quicker and easier to produce reports. It used to take us approximately 10 days to load, validate and consolidate budget data from various standalone spreadsheets. By automating these processes with ABS’ system we have reduced this to minutes, dramatically improving efficiency, while eliminating errors around data manipulation.”