etween; Comshare FDC/Commander and Hyperion Pillar are the two most visible products in this category. Both are designed for managing complex, multinational enterprise-level budgeting and can consolidate budget or actual data from multiple third-party accounting systems. What to Look For in Stand-Alone Budgeting Packages Workflow functionality. The budget process may require "top-down" or "bottom-up" budgeting. Top-down budgeting is driven by organization-level budget expectations that trickle down to the individual departments, territories or product lines, for example. Bottom-up budgeting means building organizational budgets based on the expectations of department, territory or project managers, and gradually building up toward a complete organizational budget. The budget process can involve many people at different levels of authority located around the world. Workflow functionality in budgeting software can be used to automatically distribute formalized budget templates for completion by line- or field-level business managers, to automate the collection and consolidation of budgets from around the organization, and to manage the authorization and approval of the final budget plans, revisions or forecasts. Budgeting scenarios. Budgets may be based on "vertical" organization structure hierarchies of departments, territories or product lines, for example. This requires the ability to enter, view and report budgets at any level within a given hierarchy. Alternatively, budgets may be based on horizontal cross functional or cross entity structures such as line of business or project. This requires the ability to combine budget and actual data across vertical organizational boundaries. Budget report line items may need to be built in "layers" to attain the number that is to be compared with actuals. Budget values may be mone...
