The Partner Channel Magazine_Winter 2018

SOLUTION SPOTLIGHT - ADVERTISEMENT
STEPHANIE VALENCIA
Controller and CPA,
California Medial Association (www.cmanet.org)
SOLUTION: Dynamic Budgets
The California Medical Association (CMA) is a
nonprofit organization representing physicians
of the state of California. CMA serves more than
43,000 members in all modes of practice and
specialties.
CMA managed budgets with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and
templates for years. The time it would take the controller to create
templates, gather budget information from various departments,
and then consolidate any changes to the data were hindering any
type of valuable insight throughout the company. It wasn’t a uniform
process, and CMA’s 10+ budget managers had no idea if and when
changes were made to their budgets. If something was cut, they
didn’t know the specifics of why or when it happened.
In 2017, CMA’s controller and CPA, Stephanie Valencia, started
looking into budgeting tools to streamline budget management
and forecasting within Microsoft Dynamics GP. The budget she
was working with wasn’t very large, so she thought going with
Forecaster would be their best and cheapest option since they
already owned the tool. She soon learned that not only would
implementation alone be double their budget, but Forecaster
was also outdated and losing Microsoft support. Their Partner
recommended Dynamic Budgets.
“I heard Zubin (Gidwani, founder of Dynamic Budgets) present at
GPUG® Summit a few years earlier and was very impressed with his
knowledge and his solution’s flexibility,” Stephanie shares. “Once I
learned how quickly we could be up and running, and that the price
was within our budget (half of what Forecaster would have been), I
scheduled a demo.”
During that demo, Zubin showed Stephanie how the solution
would work with their data. After that two-hour meeting, the
solution was nearly set up. Once Stephanie got approval to move
forward, they were ready to launch Dynamic Budgets within a week!
Stephanie has been using the tool now for over six months, and
it’s her go-to for pulling any type of data out of Microsoft Dynamics
GP.
“I love how Dynamics Budgets is set up: Every single screen
within the tool is exportable to Excel,” Stephanie says. “Because of
that feature, I’ve been using it for interim audits or to look things up.
It’s so much easier to manipulate data than Management Reporter
(MR) or Microsoft Dynamics GP ever was. The navigation and
export capability to Excel are so easy; it’s really awesome.”
Budget managers can now see exact specifics to when and why
budgets are changed throughout the year. They all have real-time
access to the data, and it’s a single sign-on tool, so they don’t need
to remember another password. Managers can go into Dynamic
Budgets and answer their own questions instead of going to the
controller to pull another report.
“We used MR before, but it gave them too much detail to sort
through. Now, each budget manager has their own views set up for
their budget and can easily see where they stand,” Stephanie says.
CMA just used Dynamic Budgets for the first time to plan their
2018 budget and have received great feedback from users. Because
of the increased visibility, they are able to do more of a forecast
budget. In fact, they are already making modifications to their 2018
projections with no hassle.
“We’re confident that the 2018 budget will be much more realistic
on how the year will be than it has turned out in the past thanks to
Zubin and Dynamic Budgets,” Stephanie concludes.
Make Budgeting
Great Again!
Save Time
Save Money
Be a Hero
Unlimited Users
5 hours to Go Live
Priced from $7,500 or $350 monthly
info@DynamicBudgets.com | (650) 332-6650
DynamicBudgets-122117-R5.indd 1
1/2/18 6:57 PM
26 WINTER 2018 | THEPARTNERCHANNEL.COM