Budget model with the configured integration mechanisms in Conde Nast Russia

In record 3 months Corus Consulting implemented in Condé Nast publishing house Russia full budget model with the configured integration mechanisms.

With business development at the management of Condé Nast Russia more and more time and resources on collecting of financial data and planning of budgets for all editions began to leave. The schedule system existing at the time of the beginning of the project was implemented in the form of Excel files that caused a number of inconveniences – separation of information, the raised labor costs on making changes in the created plans for each edition. CORUS Consulting suggested to use the free solution Palo developed by the German company Jedox for the analysis of financial data and budgeting.

"The choice of Jedox Palo as means for automation of budgeting was caused first of all by the fact that in Condé Nast rather simple model of planning including only formation of income and expense items was used. At the same time the needs for formation of articles connected with cash flow and balance at this stage were absent, - the curator of the project from Corus Consulting Alexey Kulakov tells. – The fact that Palo extends on the open source model was important for the customer and does not require runtime royalty fees".

For carrying out the analysis of planned and actual targets during the project integration with the accounting system of MS Dynamics NAV used in Condé Nast was implemented.

"The available experience and practices allowed to implement the full integration model executing a turn from accounts of GAAP on articles of management accounting, literally in two weeks, - Alexey Kulakov comments. – Then we provided to the customer interfaces for independent setup and comparison of all the analyst of the accounting system and system of budget management".

In a system the consolidated budget of income and expenses is result of collecting of budget data. Besides, in Palo several summary reports on different indicators of activity of editions - both all in general, and everyone form.

The income and expenditure statement comprises total values of indicators with breakdown on months. It joins the number of the sold advertizing pages in the edition, statistics of pages of different type in each edition: advertizing, promo-pages, editorial, free, pages of applications, pages of inserts, the general circulation of the edition, the number of the sold copies, quantity of the electronic copies of the magazine downloaded by users from the websites of partners, income from sale of advertizing pages, income from distribution of magazines, income from downloading of electronic versions of magazines and some other parameters.

Attracts third-party printing houses to printing of circulations of the Condé Nast editions. Each printing house has the method of calculation of printing cost based on a large number of parameters – the weight and cost of the paper, covers, printing of applications and inserts which quantity varies from number to number. From time to time there is a change of printing house and, respectively, change of model of cost accounting of circulation for the specific edition. The tool for operational assessment of change of cost value of printing depending on printing house was required for the management. In new budget model specialists of Corus Consulting successfully implemented this opportunity. It became possible to change model of calculations "one button".

Expenses on departments of the company, direct and indirect - business trips, transport, training, mobile communication, salary, depreciation charges, lease of premises - are also considered in budget model.

Within formation of the annual budget some cost types of departments are planned using register forms, specialists of Corus Consulting specify. For example, for a year the plan of business trips of employees where each trip represents a separate line with detailed information on cost, a destination point and other is formed. Cost items, department and other budget signs are specified as attributes for each business trip. Data entered by users are collected further in the relevant articles of department and are included in the final income and expenditure budget. "Work with register forms is inherent in the transaction systems, and their implementation in systems constructed on multidimensional cubes is quite difficult. However, having applied the accumulated experience, this problem managed to be solved successfully", note in Corus Consulting.

"On project deliverables we had an interconnected budget model according to all editions, – Natalia Anufriyeva, the financial controller of Condé Nast notes. – Now through Palo it is possible to analyze with ease data in any convenient kind, to create the plan-fact analysis, to build forecasts, to estimate financial perspectives of all editions, to carry out the scenario analysis "That if …" and to investigate any budget and actual data, executing creation of reports "on the fly". It considerably increases efficiency of obtaining reliable information and minimizes time of acceptance of management decisions".

Specialists of Corus Consulting during automation of the existing budget model configured entry forms and reports of Palo. Further correction of model, creation of reports and forms, are executed already by forces of planning department specialists of Condé Nast. The deep competence of Corus Consulting and wide experience of the projects implemented on Jedox Palo helped to construct budget model in extremely short time – 3 months that allowed Condé Nast to receive significant economy on the project budget.