Most ERP budgeting workflows answer one question: where is this budget in the process, who owns it, and has it been approved?
A collaborative budgeting system answers a different one: why is this number what it is, who contributed to the assumption, what changed, what still needs discussion, and how do finance and the business converge on a number?
Those are different problems.
Many finance teams run their annual budget through a dedicated ERP module that feels rigid and slow. The module cannot bend to the nuance of how a business organizes, calculates, consolidates, and presents its numbers. AFP’s 2025 FP&A Benchmarking Survey found that 96% of finance professionals still use spreadsheets for planning. With Vivid, customers build the budget in Excel with structure behind it, working alongside prior-year actuals in one place. ERP budgeting tends to treat budgeting as a controlled financial process; Vivid treats it as a collaborative management process.
A recent Vivid customer spotlight session surfaced a clear answer on how teams speed the budgeting process up: keep the budget in Excel, bring the reference data next to it, and refresh instead of rebuild.
Why the standard budgeting module slows teams down
Mark Marlatt of Bloedorn Lumber found the Dynamics GP budget module less than ideal for the way his team wanted to work. A separate module means moving between the budget and the numbers that inform it, exporting figures, and reconciling versions. The budget lives apart from the actuals it is built on, so every comparison takes an extra step.
Build the budget in Excel, with the actuals beside it
Mark’s team moved budgeting into Excel with Vivid, with prior-year actuals and current-year figures sitting next to the budget lines. Working this way removed the back-and-forth between systems. The team could see what happened last year, what is happening now, and what they are proposing for next year in a single view aligned to how the business organizes and consolidates its own reporting, then adjust directly.
Cut the budget cycle by more than half
The change showed up in the calendar. Mark described a budget cycle that now takes less than half the time it used to. Faster budgeting is worth having on its own, but the larger gain is the finance capacity it returns. Weeks that went to assembling and reconciling the budget become weeks the team can spend elsewhere. The ERP budget process still works, and final budgets load back into GP; what Vivid added was the ability to make budgeting a streamlined, collaborative process aligned to the business rather than a rigid one dictated by the limits of an ERP finance module.
Refresh next year instead of rebuilding
A budget built with structure carries forward as an asset to the business, making each cycle faster and easier than the last. When the next cycle comes, the team refreshes the same models with new actuals rather than rebuilding the workbook. The layout, the logic, and the links stay intact; only the numbers change. Change something once and it changes everywhere it appears, so the team is not rewiring spreadsheets every year to run the same process.
What this looks like in practice
For a team considering the move, the pattern from the session breaks down into a few steps:
- Move the budget input process out of rigid, statically linked spreadsheets and into a flexible, finance-owned collaborative budgeting environment using Vivid.
- Bring prior-year actuals and current figures next to the budget lines.
- Build the models once, with the structure that lets you refresh them.
- Each new cycle, refresh with current actuals rather than starting over.
None of it asks the team to leave Excel. The spreadsheets and input templates they already know gain structure and become dynamic as the reference data comes to them, and the annual budget stops consuming months of the year.
If your annual budget takes longer than it should, let’s investigate where the time goes with your team. Book a discovery call and we will walk through your current process and where Vivid can tighten it.
