MODLR

“budgeting transforms completely with it”

Pros

At first MODLR felt like one of those tools management wants everyone to adopt and since we had been consolidating company-wide budgets in Excel for years, most of us were more comfortable sticking with that. Even though Excel had its limitations, it was familiar. After actually working in it, though, my opinion changed completely and I honestly wonder why we didn't start using it sooner. It lets me bring all of my budget entries together in one place which has made the whole process much more manageable. The browser-based interface feels a lot like Excel so getting used to it didn't take long at all. real time data storage has also made a huge difference. Instead of emailing spreadsheets back and forth, renaming files for every version and trying to keep track of what changed, we can now rely on the audit reporting to see exactly when a budget was updated and who made the change. That alone has added much more accountability to the process. We spend far less time chasing email threads and figuring out version history and much more time actually focusing on the budget itself. I also really value how quickly I can drill up into the financial data and pull cross-sections of the budget without having to rebuild pivot tables every time a new budgeting category comes up. During annual budgeting, this has saved us weeks of work and has translated into significant cost savings as well.

Cons

One thing that would make it even better is having a built-in live chat feature so my colleagues and I could communicate directly inside the application while making updates. Right now we use Skype for Business which works well enough but it would be much more convenient if everything were available in one place so we wouldn't have to keep switching between tools or remembering which app to use.