Budget process use case

Today, the budgeting process for a typical marketing department can look a lot like this:

Nate, the finance manager, provides Jane, the VP of marketing, with a budget template containing last year’s departmental expenses. Jane reviews the spreadsheet, makes edits for the coming year and emails a copy of the draft budget to her four direct reports for their input. These four people make their input to their individual copies of the budget document, save their unique version on their desktops and then e-mail back their files back to Jane.

Jane must now open and manually review the four documents from her direct staff members, making edits manually in the spreadsheet, or copying and pasting changes. She saves a final draft on her hard drive, e-mails that version back to Nate and copies her direct reports requesting that they delete their prior versions and review this version to be sure she incorporated everything correctly.

Nate then takes this department version from Jane, saves it on his hard drive, incorporates any additional changes he has and forwards the document on to the CEO and CFO for their approval, along with a copy to Jane. If the CEO and CFO make changes, Nate must incorporate their input, save the document once more on his hard drive and e-mail the final budget to Jane and the rest of the team. Jane and her group must once again save this version over all other prior versions of the document or risk working from inaccurate budget numbers.

Here is what the budget process looks like with NextPage 2:

Jane fills in her draft budget from Nate’s template and e-mails it back. The new version is immediately viewable by Jane’s four direct reports. These four individuals make edits to the budget document, send their versions back, and Jane is notified that the document now has four additional new versions. Jane merges the four versions and sends off the new version to Nate. Of course, all he sees is the composite document, along with Jane and the four-member staff.

Nate then adds his final revisions, e-mails his version, and Jane and her team automatically receive the final document as sent to upper management. Nate then merges this document with his master budget template for the entire company and saves this version to the shared drive to make it immediately viewable by the CEO and CFO. After these executives make changes, Nate is notified and merges their input into a final company budget. As soon as Nate e-mails the document, Jane is notified and she is able to review only her department's portion of the final budget—nothing else. Jane e-mails the new document, and it replaces any prior budget versions and is immediately available to Jane’s team. Now, if anyone tries to open an out-of-date version they are notified that a new one exists and can immediatley access it from their hard drive, e-mail or the server.

With NextPage 2, no one’s edits get lost along the way. No one’s hard drive gets filled with versions of the budget that are inaccurate. Everyone gets the information they need to make sound, informed decisions. And everything stays within reach directly from each user’s desktop so it can be accessed even when they're disconnected from the company’s network.