Finnish-Russian Chamber of Commerce (FRCC) (Palo for Excel (Jedox))

Certificate of the company.

The Finnish-Russian Chamber of Commerce (FRCC) is created in 1946. The mission of FRTP - assistance of business activity and competitiveness of the companies and also to economic relations between Finland and Russia. In FRTP there are (12/2012) apprx. 900 member companies, among them about 750 Finnish and about 150 Russian members, 2/3 members of FRTP are small and medium companies. FRTP has structural divisions in Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Yekaterinburg.

Setting of a problem.

The FRTP budget model during several formed on the basis of an available and popular financial instrument in the environment - spreadsheets of Excel. But over time the budget model became complicated and receiving final and correct indicators began to take a lot of time. Analytical opportunities of Excel were also insufficient for solving of tasks of FRTP. Therefore there was a question of transition to a specialized budgeting system and planning. The financial service formulated the main criteria (requirements) to a system:

• a possibility of setup in the new program of structure of the income and expenditure budget, operating budgets of the foreign organization having several types of activity and several structural divisions including in Russia, with a possibility of consolidation of information on the organization in general. Also setup of import of actual data from the western accounting system had to be provided;
• the "low" cost of the software product which will allow "keep within" strictly certain funding frameworks of the project.

Besides, the option of implementation of the FRTP budget model based on the accounting systems was not considered.

Choice and system implementation.

Articles on the Internet devoted to the overview of software products for budgeting helped to make preliminary selection of solutions. It seemed what remained further things are easy: select the program, suitable for FRTP. However search of a combination - the "smart" program and the low price - at some point looked almost impracticable task: owing to their high cost it was necessary to refuse some solutions, others did not approach by criterion of functionality. And though search took a lot of time, the optimal solution, after all, managed to be found. The choice led to Palo for Excel, the software product from the German company Jedox.

The feature of this product is that it is freely extended, i.e. payment for licenses is not required. Important advantage of Palo for Excel was also presence of the visual designer who allows "build" budget models of any industry accessory, without resorting to programming. The integrator, Neologix of the Missile Defence LLC company which acquainted the FRTP financial service with this product offered the accelerated implementation option (in fact – the mini-project) which consisted of only three following steps (or stages):

• Creation of the Prototype of the FRTP budget model which included the main types of budgets;
• Setup of import of actual data;
• Training.

The main emphasis on this mini-project was put on training of staff of the FRTP financial service in functionality of a product. It gave the chance to them independently "bring" budget model to operating condition and transfer its functioning to the mode of commercial operation.

Results of Implementation.

Using the Palo for Excel system it was succeeded to implement budget model which contains as the aggregated information on income and expenses on 8 types of activity and detailed – on each type of activity (on the basis of more than 100 articles). Besides, budgets of 4 divisions of FRTP which are included into the consolidated budget of income and expenses are implemented. Data for previous years were also imported (planned, actual) that allowed to carry out the full plan-fact analysis of activity of FRTP. Aggregate term of implementation of this mini-project made only three weeks that considerably differs in a favorable side from many implementations of budgeting systems for the sphere of small and medium business in the Russian Federation. The short project description was stated in article "Solution of Finnish-Russian Chamber of Commerce" in the Finansovy Direktor magazine, No. 12, 2013.