The most highlighted area within the company operations is the branch of controlling consultation. Gordon & Webster Inc. included in their portfolio a most famous business planning and controlling software in the world: Professional Planner, developed by the controlling department of the University of Economic Sciences of Graz. Users of Professional Planner, a system based on the inbuilt business intelligence, create their business plans quickly and more transparently, monitor the accomplishment of the plan simply, as opposed to those drudging with cells of spreadsheets. Professional Planner performs functions that systems with general ledger, management and business organisation functions are not able to cover appropriately, and the use of Excel tables imply unacceptably high possibilities for errors.

Professional Planner is a complex and efficient financial planning and controlling, as well as an executive report generator device. Apart from considerably facilitating the company-level planning, the system primarily provides comprehensive information for company owners and the top management about, among others, the position of the company, the effects of company processes, the effectiveness of the operations and the efficiency based on the planned and actual data. The solution may actually be employed by any company, regardless of whether they have any and what kind of business management system, as Professional Planner is able to receive data from traditional Excel tables and business applications as well.

Professional Planner provides the owner and the top management with a large amount of extra information, exact company indicators processed by many viewpoints. It is a great advantage that the meticulous mechanical part of controlling that may imply a number of errors is made simple and quick, thus professionals may devote their time and energy on the actual controlling activity, the analysis of data, comparisons, simulations, sensitivity tests and decision preparation.

Functionalities of generally used business management systems fail to perfectly satisfy the requirements of financial planning and controlling. Actually, this is not a defect as these applications are designed to support the actual, transaction processes. For financial planning a designated financial planning and controlling software is required, the lack of which involves the general practise of creating plans, financial plan documents and statements by exporting base data with the help of a row of Excel sheets, even though it implies multiple errors. (According to an article of the Journal of Accountancy in 90% of the spreadsheets every 150 lines contain one mistake that seriously influences the totals.) Professional Planner may be integrated into the prevailing IT system, may be connected to any company application, thus factual data may be reported in a structure identical with that of planning. Also, due to the data connection continuous planned-actual data comparison and deviation analysis may be carried out in the system.

The implementation of Professional Planner is extraordinarily quick, which is mostly due to the almost 160 prepared, defined and delivered (with the software) financial documents, indicators and diagrams that corresponds to and leads beyond the law of accountancy. Rapid implementation is also facilitated by the MS Excel-like user interface, that provides for quick and easy use and simple training. The true secret of quick implementation, however, is the internal logic protected by patent laws, named the Advanced Business Intelligence (ABI), with the help of which Professional Planner is able to automatically calculate consequential values connected to the entered data. Thanks to ABI, Professional Planner, already upon installation, knows the correlations between data tables, reports and entry lines as well as the standard controlling formulas, thus by filling in some special planning documents profit and loss plans, balance plans and cash flow plans, just like all the other documents and reports will be available.

The three basic financial reports, profit and loss account, balance sheet and cash flow, and all the other reports generated from the data of the previous will be fully integrated, and as a result the changes will run through the whole system and will evoke all the necessary changes. With the inbuilt numbering optimisers this process only takes a few seconds, thus a greatest strength of the software is the simulation that may be performed on the company level. The system supports planning starting from profit centres and cost centres, but also planning may be initiated from above, by entering aggregates. Multiple planning versions may be created in the software, and users may also receive forecasts corrected with factual data. With supplementary functions exchange rate risks may be planned at companies sensitive to such changes. In case of an organisation with more companies consolidation is supported even in the planning level, by filtering on the opposite turnovers.

Documents corresponding to Hungarian and foreign standards are provided simultaneously, in multiple languages for foreign companies. The system may be installed individually and in a multiple user network version.

The first Hungarian users of Professional Planner include Duropack Starpack LTD in Füzesabony, Neusiedler-Szolnpk Paper Manufacturing Factory Inc. in Szolnok, PannonPower Holding Inc. that provides the city of Pécs with electric energy, PÉTÁV District Heating LTD at Pécs and the Debrecen Logistical Centre and Industrial Park.

Would you like more information about Professional Planner? Our consultants are ready to give a brief presentation.

www.professionalplanner.com