Guru Review: Budgeting for Small Businesses

No business owner would disagree - accurate budgeting and forecasting are critical for the success of any small or midsize business.

Guru provides an intuitive yet powerful solution to simplify and improve your budgeting and forecasting process like no other software.**

In this review, we'll explore Guru's user-friendly interface, flexible top-down and bottom-up budgeting, driver-based forecasting models with scenario planning, robust reporting and analytics, quick setup and ongoing support, and ultimately whether it's the right fit for your small or mid-size business needs.

Introduction

Guru is a user-friendly budgeting and forecasting software designed to help small and midsize businesses easily create financial plans and models without the need for extensive training or consulting fees.

What is Guru?

Guru is a cloud-based platform that provides budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and analytics tools tailored for small and midsize business needs. Key features include:

• Customizable templates to quickly build financial models
• Workflows to automate budgeting and forecasting
• Collaborative editing for finance teams
• Version control for tracking changes
• Advanced reporting and analytics

The goal of Guru is to make financial planning intuitive and accessible for growing companies.

Key Capabilities

With Guru, businesses can:

• Create budgets and forecasts with customizable templates
• Analyze financial data and spot trends with reporting tools
• Collaborate across teams with shared access and permissions
• Track changes to models using version histories
• Generate insightful graphical reports for stakeholders

By centralizing budgeting and forecasting activities, Guru enables finance teams to work more efficiently and effectively. The easy-to-use platform requires no extensive consulting or training fees.

Budgeting Features

Guru provides robust budgeting capabilities to help businesses effectively plan their finances. The intuitive interface makes building and managing budgets simple without complex Excel work.

Intuitive Interface

Guru's budgeting interface allows users to easily build departmental budgets leveraging historical data and growth assumptions. The simple yet powerful interface eliminates Excel complexity. Users can:

• Quickly create and update budgets for any timeframe based on previous periods
• Build budgets at the department, category or line item level
• Easily make mass updates to an entire budget or specific line items
• View budget vs. actuals and quickly analyze variances

Top-Down & Bottom-Up

Guru supports both strategic top-down budgeting and detailed bottom-up budgeting, enabling alignment between finance and department teams.

• Finance leaders can set high-level goals and guidelines
• Department managers can build detailed budgets following the broader organization targets
• Updates at any level automatically flow between top-down and bottom-up views

This flexibility facilitates collaboration while maintaining control and alignment.

Audit Trails & Versions

Every budget change in Guru is logged with the editor name, timestamp, and change details. Past versions can be accessed for comparison and analysis.

• Understand when, why, and by who changes were made
• Restore previous budget versions
• Compare versions to analyze and report on budget evolution

Robust audit trails and version control provide essential transparency and accountability in the budgeting process.

Forecasting

Forecasting is a critical capability for small and midsize businesses to effectively budget and plan for the future. Guru provides robust and intuitive forecasting features to support data-driven decision making.

Driver-Based Models

Guru allows you to build customized forecast models based on key business drivers. Simply identify the metrics that impact your financial performance, like sales volume, price increases, marketing spend, etc., and Guru will automatically update your forecasts when those input assumptions change. This allows you to instantly see how different growth levers will affect your top and bottom line results.

For example, you can model out the impact of a 2% price hike across your product lines to determine if the additional margin is worthwhile. Or you can adjust your sales and marketing budgets to optimize spend and profitability targets. Driver-based modeling makes it easy to test different operating scenarios and determine the best path forward.

Scenarios

In addition to driver-based models, Guru enables scenario planning with its flexible what-if analysis capabilities. You can quickly build multiple forecast versions to stress test your business plan under different market conditions.

Create an "upside" case that bakes in aggressive growth assumptions, a "base" case that reflects the most likely outcomes, and a "downside" case to assess contingency plans. Guru makes it simple to generate and compare these scenarios with just a few clicks. As the year unfolds, you'll be able to determine if you're tracking to plan or need to adjust financial targets and operating assumptions.

Accuracy Tracking

While forecasting future results has its challenges, Guru provides the tools to continually improve predictability. You can track forecast vs. actual performance over time to pinpoint bias in your projections. These insights allow you to fine-tune both your forecasting techniques and operating practices to enhance financial control.

For example, if you consistently overestimate revenue but underestimate expenses, you can adjust model assumptions to improve alignment. Or if certain business units are missing forecasts, you can provide supplemental coaching and resources to get them back on track. By monitoring accuracy trends, you can hold your organization accountable and make data-driven corrections to boost financial planning capabilities over time.

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Reporting & Analysis

Reporting and analytics are critical for transforming data into actionable business insights. Guru provides powerful yet intuitive tools to unlock deep visibility across key financial and operational KPIs.

Interactive Dashboards

Guru features real-time interactive dashboards that enable dynamic data discovery. Users can visually track critical metrics, instantly filter by multiple dimensions, and drill down into granular details. Customizable dashboard layouts empower users to focus on the most relevant insights.

Ad-Hoc Analysis

The self-service ad-hoc analysis tools make it easy to slice and dice data on the fly without relying on experts. Users can quickly analyze root causes behind trends, compare scenarios, and simulate planning models to inform better decisions.

Sharing & Collaboration

Guru allows users to securely share live dashboards and reports to align all stakeholders. Annotate directly on visualizations and attach comments to nurture organization-wide dialogue. Schedule automated report distribution or set access permissions to ensure sensitive data reaches the right people.

Implementation & Support

Quick Setup

Vintti's intuitive setup wizards allow new customers to get started in just a few hours. Step-by-step guidance simplifies the process without the need for extensive training. Businesses can rapidly integrate remote accounting talent into their operations.

Ongoing Support

A dedicated customer success team provides extensive support throughout the onboarding process and beyond. Customers have access to ongoing phone and email assistance to address any questions or issues that arise. The team helps ensure a smooth transition and continued satisfaction.

Training & Community

Vintti offers a range of training resources to help customers maximize value. These include how-to guides, informational videos, interactive webinars, and an online community forum. Customers can access troubleshooting information, best practices, and peer insights to optimize their use of Vintti's services. The resources empower businesses to effectively leverage their remote accounting staff.

Pricing & Trials

Subscription Model

Vintti offers flexible subscription plans to meet the diverse staffing needs and budgets of businesses. Their pricing is based on a simple usage-based model that scales with the number of users and use cases.

The key features of their pricing model include:

• Monthly subscriptions: Businesses only pay for active users each month, allowing costs to scale up and down based on changing needs
• Tiered user pricing: Plans available for teams of all sizes, with discounts for higher user volumes
• Pay-as-you-go billing: Usage charges based on actual services utilized that month so costs track closely with business activity

This model provides transparency into costs and ensures efficient alignment between services consumed and monthly spend.

Free Trial

Vintti offers a risk-free 14-day free trial so businesses can fully explore their services before purchasing.

The free trial includes:

• Full access to Vintti's platform, including candidate profiles and hiring tools
• Ability to post jobs and start screening accounting/finance candidates
• Support from Vintti's team to answer questions and guide trial users

No credit card is required to start the free trial. This allows interested businesses to evaluate Vintti's offering before making any financial commitment.

The free trial period provides ample time to experience the efficiency of their hiring process, quality of candidates, and level of support first-hand. This gives businesses the confidence to move forward with Vintti for their specialized staffing needs after seeing the value delivered.

Conclusion

To conclude, Guru offers an intuitive and affordable solution for automating budgeting, forecasting and reporting tailored to SMBs. The platform aims to enable finance teams to become more efficient, accurate and insightful without costly consulting fees or manual Excel work.

Specifically, Guru provides the following key benefits for SMBs looking to improve their budgeting and forecasting processes:

• Intuitive interface - The software is designed for ease of use, with built-in best practices and templates so SMBs can get up and running quickly without the need for extensive training.

• Affordable pricing - Pricing starts at just $25 per user per month, a fraction of the cost of large ERP systems or hiring external consultants.

• Automation - Guru automates previously manual processes for building driver-based models, running what-if analysis, and generating reports. This saves significant time and effort.

• Accuracy - By centralizing data and enabling collaboration across departments, Guru improves forecast accuracy over traditional Excel methods prone to errors and version control issues.

• Actionable insights - Users can easily visualize performance trends, understand business drivers, and identify issues for a more insightful and data-driven approach to planning.

In summary, Guru aims to make best practice budgeting, forecasting, and reporting achievable for SMBs without the typical resource and capability barriers. For finance teams looking to modernize their processes, Guru presents an affordable path to increased efficiency, accuracy and insight.

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