Public Sector Budget Planning and Forecasting in Dynamics 365 F&O | OnActuate
 In A-Data & Analytics, A-ERP, A-Public Sector, Trending Insights

Discover solutions to help streamline your financial processes

The fiscal planning process is a vital time of the year for public sector organizations. Your ability to accurately budget and forecast is essential to assess financial performance, secure future funds, allocate resources, and make strategic decisions.

To be accountable to your community and the organizations that provide critical funding, it’s important to have an ERP system in place that simplifies and streamlines these financial processes. After decades of tailoring enterprise technology to the public sector, OnActuate has found the most success with Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (F&O). It is a trusted end-to-end ERP solution that can be easily configured to fit public sector requirements. In fact, we have developed a repeatable, proven ERP methodology called City-in-the-Box to help you quickly implement and adopt Dynamics 365 in your organization.

Whether you are new to the world of Dynamics 365 or not, budget planning and forecasting should be a must-have requirement in your ERP software. To educate you on the out-of-the-box reporting and analytics capabilities included in Dynamics 365 F&O, we have created a downloadable tip sheet with a full overview of the budgeting functionality, reporting, and forecasting that is available for the public sector.

Here’s an overview:

  • Budget functionality

In Dynamics 365 F&O, you can easily configure and use basic financials and budget control. It has two low-code reporting options to help your technical and non-technical users gather financial data and create budgets for analysis: Financial Report Designer and Power BI. Several methodologies are available for defining budgets in your public sector organization, including zero-based budgeting and historical budgeting. With help from an experienced partner, like OnActuate, you can easily configure your budget dimensions to your unique operations.

  • Budget reporting

To create standard financial and budget reports in Dynamics 365 F&O, you can use Excel, Power BI, SSRS, or a feature called Embedded Analytics. You have the option to set up multiple budgeting scenarios, templates, and workflows, with several dimensions to choose from. It’s important to note that before you can build accurate budget reports, you may need to arrange how you will pull data from multiple data sources, which is something you can ask one of our experts about.

  • Budget forecasting

Financial forecasting is a core component of budget planning and can be achieved through Power BI integration. When connected to your Dynamics 365 F&O and other data sources, Power BI can be used to create and share custom reports, queries, and dashboards that determine trends, analyze key performance metrics, and help predict future outcomes based on actuals.

Power BI Dashboards for Budgeting example:

Download our tip sheet for more information on budget planning and forecasting.






    Evaluate Your Reporting and Budgeting Requirements

    Now that you have a basic knowledge of the out-of-the-box reporting and analytics capabilities in Dynamics 365 F&O, it’s time to define your own budgeting requirements. With over 30 years of experience working with state and local agencies, we understand the budget and approval processes you must deal with every day. We’re here to help you assess your existing technical environment and find tangible ways to reduce manual processes, enhance efficiency, and increase data accuracy.

    To talk to one of our experts about your current reporting and budgeting needs, book an assessment below.

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