Simplifying Budget Reconciliation: Integrating NetSuite with Uptempo 

Being a busy marketing professional means every minute counts. Between managing complex plans, budgets, campaigns, and reports, there’s little time for tedious tasks. Marketers constantly seek ways to streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and improve communication across teams. This is especially true when it comes to budget management, which can be a headache when manual processes eat up valuable hours. 

Manual expense reconciliation is time consuming and overwhelming. This mind-numbing process often includes compiling, categorizing, comparing and identifying variances in expenses using excel spreadsheets, consuming countless hours each month. And without regular and accurate reconciliation, marketers lack insights into their budget, putting them at risk of over or underspending, missing targets, and hindering marketing agility.  

This is where Uptempo steps in to make life easier through integrations with ERP, EPM and other financial applications such as NetSuite. Uptempo provides a marketing system of record for budget management that consolidates investment plans and spend management on a single platform. Uptempo cuts through time consuming manual processes by automating reconciliation, approvals, transfers, and re-allocation of funds. As a result, your team: 

• Stays on budget  
• Saves time 
• Eliminates or greatly reduces errors 
• Identifies unspent dollars for reallocation 
• Improves communications and collaboration  
• Gets data-driven insights into ROI and the effectiveness of your spend  

Keeping Marketing Teams on Budget

Your marketing team has set ambitious goals and a strict budget. Overspending is simply not an option. By integrating NetSuite with Uptempo, you establish a seamless flow of spend data from NetSuite into Uptempo, enabling real-time visibility, monitoring, and control of your marketing spend. This ensures no accidental overspending and maximum bang for your buck.  

Armed with real-time financial insights, Marketers can strategically allocate resources, address budget concerns proactively, and pivot funds to where they’ll make the greatest impact. The impact is evident: since deploying Uptempo, Juniper has consistently remained within 1% of the budget every quarter. Additionally, they now have the flexibility to easily reallocate budgets in response to market changes and capitalize on opportunities.  

Streamlining Budget Reconciliation

Manual budget reconciliation is a time sink. Plus, it’s error prone and hardly the best use of a marketer’s valuable time. Integrating with NetSuite automates the manual process, freeing up valuable time and eliminating data entry nightmares. With NetSuite seamlessly integrated, spending will flow into Uptempo and you’ll be able to easily compare planned versus actual spending, speeding up the budgeting process while also ensuring accuracy in your reporting. With this automation in place, teams can redirect their focus to more impactful tasks that move the needle. 

Box’s experience exemplifies the benefits of automated budget reconciliation. They now have complete confidence in their programs with a granular view of spending, and a plan-to-spend variance of less than 1%. Despite budgets not increasing, Box’s return on investment surged from 4:1 to 9:1 after implementing Uptempo.  

Improving Communication and Collaboration

We all know that effective communication and collaboration between marketing, finance and executive teams are keys to success. But sometimes, getting everyone on the same page feels impossible. This is where the integration with NetSuite proves invaluable, bridging the gap between marketing, finance, and executive teams. The result is tailored views of the up-to-date budget and financial reports for different stakeholders based on what they care about. This helps avoid time-consuming effort to reconcile competing spreadsheets, miscommunication, errors, finger-pointing, or worse. 

How does the integration work?

Integrating NetSuite with Uptempo is a straightforward process. Below is a simplified overview of the process: 

1. Adopt Uptempo ID:

• The Uptempo ID serves as a key element for reconciling data from NetSuite or any ERP with Uptempo. 
• This process involves configuring mapping logic by the Uptempo Professional Services Team.
• Each financial record, such as purchase orders, expense reports, and vendor bills, will include an Uptempo ID.  
• The Professional Services team will work with your team to determine the optimal placement of Uptempo IDs on each record type. 
• Using the Uptempo ID, we will map the actual records in your financial system to its corresponding Uptempo line item.  

2. File Exports:  

• Provide PO and Actual file exports in a predefined format with Uptempo IDs included. 

3. Automated Imports:  

• Define your file format and establish automated import processes.
• Schedule imports to an SFTP, typically reconciling budgets at month-end, although frequency can vary based on organizational processes.  

4. Delivery:  

• Collaborate with our team to schedule file deliveries to your chosen EFTP for seamless integration.

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By connecting Uptempo with your ERP, EPM or any financial application, budget management becomes a whole lot easier for everyone involved. It requires little effort to set up, and the benefits are long lasting. Feel free to reach out to our team anytime; we’re here to support you in making your budget management even easier.