If circles had a beginning, planning would be the beginning of the controlling cycle. If you determine what you want to achieve in advance, you can then later see what you actually accomplished. In DeltaMaster, you can use the same multidimensional functionality that you use to find and report variances for planning as well.

Decision-makers regularly risk a peek in the future in hopes that they can influence it in the present. In fact, they plan everything including balance sheet, profit and loss, liquidity, profitability, cash flow, budgets, utilization, volume and revenues. Planning guides our actions, allows us to create benchmarks and often even helps us win budgets or investors. If you want to chisel your plans, you need tools - and DeltaMaster has built-in planning functions so you can start planning right away.

Information-dense planning templates: Sparklines are just as helpful in planning as in reporting - and they look good, too.

DeltaMaster has built-in planning functions for collecting data and administering the application. To activate these features in DeltaMaster, you simply need to acquire a license for the Planning Option. Users can conduct multidimensional, real-time analyses - for example, simulations or what-if analyses - all within the familiar user interface. This way, they can check the plausibility and rationale of their budget data during the planning process. Users can even enter their data through a Web browser. And since DeltaMaster does support purely relational database access, you can administer master data as well.

The Planning Option provides the necessary components for relational and/or OLAP-based data entry and corrections. The type and scope of functionality depends on the underlying database. We personally have good experiences with Microsoft SQL Server/Analysis Services. In combination with DeltaMaster, you can:

• define any number of scenarios including budget, actual, best case, worse case and forecast
• support planning from the bottom up, from the top down or in both directions
• write back into the OLAP database including protocol information (e. g. who changed what and when) and automatic value allocations
• copy data via drag & drop, for example, based on the previous year's developments
• generate suggested values to facilitate data entry
• fix values and automatically reallocate changes in other values
• render value changes, for example, in calculated measures (e. g. if you want to increase floor space revenues, you need to increase revenues and not decrease floor space)
• create server-side text information and cell comments on individual or aggregated levels
• conduct multidimensional, real-time analyses, for example, budget-actual or budget-budget comparisons

DeltaMaster supports multilevel planning applications. This way, you can create an administrative interface to define roles and monitor the progress of the planning process. You can also build data entry templates containing built-in plausibility checks and conditional entries. Using the same distribution options that you know from reporting, you can then publish these templates to the respective budget owners. This way, users can enter budget data locally without a separate client installation. The data storage, however, is centralized and requires no further import steps.

When it comes to planning, reporting and analysis, DeltaMaster is an all-around talent.

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