The BEN Financial Engine™ integrates with existing financial and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications to align project-based and cost center-based budgets and actuals, instilling financial governance and cost transparency across the enterprise.

The product's ability to maintain complex many-to-many relationships between projects and cost centers simplifies the iterative process of adjusting project budgets to align with business customers and top down budget guidelines. Project managers can easily build project-based budgets by entering time-phased estimates of labor, non-labor, capital and expense. And providing, sponsoring and delivering organizations can view budgets tailored to their specific needs.

With the BEN Financial Engine, organizations can streamline traditionally cumbersome and error-prone spreadsheet-based budgeting processes, increase financial transparency and alignment by engaging business in the budgeting process, and easily access accurate financial information to make better and faster decisions.

Invest to Maximize Return
The BEN Financial Engine helps organizations align Finance and Business on anticipated expenditures and then validate actual spend so they can:

• Increase portfolio return by funding the most important projects and identifying and re-allocating excess budget
• Enhance portfolio performance by instilling spend transparency and financial control across the enterprise
• Reduce time and effort by automating the project budget consolidation and reconciliation process

Functionality
BEN Financial Engine includes the following functionality:

• Project and Resource-driven Budget and Approval
  • Budget by project, initiative and organization
  
  
  • Budget billable and non-billable projects
  
  
  • Budget revenue and expense
  
  
  • Configure budget rules
  
  
  • Define multi-year and rolling budgets
• Comprehensive Rate Management
  • Define flexible rates for budget
  
  
  • Establish multiple rate hierarchies
  
  
  • Use the same or different rates for actuals
• Integration
  • Integrate with third-party general ledger systems, including providing and sponsoring cost center transactions
  
  
  • Perform prior period adjustments
  
  
  • Align budget management with portfolio, program and project management
• Additional Financial Management Functionality
  • Inclusion of capital expenditures in non-labor expenses
  
  
  • Incremental project funding
  
  
  • Major expenditure requests
  
  
  • Real-time data vs. historical data views
  
  
  • View-based (resource, cost center, or organization) breakdown of labor components (salary, fringe, etc.)