I am going to be integrating Manager with my CRM system via the API shortly.
One goal I would like to solve with linking Manager to my CRM system is to create a budget (profit forecast) for each financial year and also to implement cash flow forecasting. I am not clear if profit forecast and budgeting are the same thing?
My thoughts are to create annual quotes each year for each client as they themselves need to do an annual budget. I would like the upcoming financial year’s expenditure by clients to be agreed before their financial year starts. I would make these quotes in a category called budgeting or something like that. This would to some extent address the income side of the budget. On the portal, I would be able to see what the income totals for each inventory item, non-inventory item would be composed of. Something I currently cannot do in the Manager Budget/Profit and Loss form.
For the expenses side, I could possibly use Purchase Orders (again in a budgeting category) to extrapolate expected expenditure for the upcoming financial year. I could include my corporation tax as an estimate based on the current financial year’s budget I guess. I will also need to add Capital Asset Expenditure during that year as well.
All this would give me is what income I am expecting to receive in the following financial year and what my expected expenditure will be. I don’t expect to update this much if at all, during the year as the purpose of the report is to see how much cash I will have at the end of the year after all my sales and purchase. Hopefully the api can link this back to the Manager Budget form. This will be fantastic for budgeting or should I say more accurately profit forecast, but does not help with cash flow.
I am trying to see if there is some way that I can use the existing data in Manager to create the cash flow reports based on the budget information already entered. I am wondering if creating a custom field on these budget quotes and budget purchase orders where I can put a date in to mark when this income/expenditure would take place although I do have services that I pay monthly rather than annually. But I can’t see it working as cashflow needs to be updated dynamically in real time. It’s not a static report like the budget will be more or less.
Does anyone else have a better idea. I currently find budgeting in Manger too time consuming and currently have no cash flow forecasting at all.