Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Acteon BudgetGuide™ Eases Budgeting Woes at Three Based New England Companies

Acteon BudgetGuide™ Eases Budgeting Woes at Three Based New England Companies

Acteon BudgetGuide™ Corporate Financial Planning Software Ideal for Mid-Sized Companies, Stresses Low Cost and Ease-of-Use.

WESTFORD, MA (PRWEB) August 28, 2003 -

– Acteon Technologies, Inc. announced the general availability of Acteon BudgetGuide™, the first budgeting and forecasting application designed specifically to help mid-sized companies save time and money during the budgeting and forecasting process.

The company also announced the first three BudgetGuide customers: Walker Magnetic Group of Worcester, MA, Performix Technologies of Burlington, MA, and Harvey Industries, Inc. of Waltham, MA.

A developer of powerful, easy-to-use corporate financial planning software, Acteon created BudgetGuide as an alternative to complex spreadsheet-based budgeting or expensive ERP-class planning tools. Built for mid-market companies—typically those with revenues ranging from $20 to $500 million—BudgetGuide helps improve financial planning processes, reduces costs, and strengthens financial controls. More importantly, BudgetGuide can be installed, configured and managed without expensive consultants. Its intuitive design allows companies to deploy a structured, distributed budgeting system within weeks or even days.

“Companies' budgeting processes are under greater scrutiny than ever before—but many companies still haven't been able to justify the investment in the high-end systems because of their initial and ongoing costs,” said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research. “Acteon's solution gives them more visibility, accountability, and productivity than spreadsheets, without a huge dollar investment or long deployment effort.”

Acteon BudgetGuide features include:

• top-down strategic planning combined with bottoms-up budgeting;

• a collaborative workflow design that increases manager participation in the budgeting process while maintaining central control of the data;

• powerful analytic tools allowing better informed decision making based on real-time data;

• rolling forecasting and dynamic budgeting capabilities that keep score of a companyÂ’s health and wealth throughout the fiscal year; and

• a robust report writer that easily creates and delivers accurate and customizable boardroom quality reports with a key stroke.

“With Acteon BudgetGuide, I can automate many tasks previously done manually using spreadsheets,” said Debra Krikorian, controller, Walker Magnetics, an early adopter of the product. “We’ve been very pleased with the product. We were able to get up and running quickly, and find it easy to use. Our managers still use a spreadsheet-like interface to enter and manage their budget data, but I no longer have to worry about consolidating the information from dozens of different spreadsheets. Now it’s all handled automatically. It’s made our budgeting process much easier to manage.”

“BudgetGuide lets us quickly determine the impact of financial changes on our business plan,” said MaryAnn LePage, controller at Performix Technologies. “In addition to its budgeting capabilities, Acteon BudgetGuide has let us easily test ‘what if’ financial scenarios. Our management has already seen the value of this product before the budgeting process really even started.”

“BudgetGuide’s workflow feature makes it possible for me to distribute the budgeting process to our distribution centers and cost centers,” said Tony Furlan, vice president and controller of Harvey Industries. “Before BudgetGuide, I used to collect data from twenty eight locations in eight states and build the budgets myself. Now I can distribute parts of the budgeting and forecasting process without sacrificing control over the budget. We build more accurate budgets in a third of the time.”

BudgetGuide is available directly from Acteon Technologies, and can cost as little as one-fifth that of the competition, making BudgetGuide much more affordable than other budgeting or ERP-based solutions on the market today.

About Acteon Technologies

Based in Westford, Massachusetts, Acteon Technologies, Inc. is a developer of high quality business solutions for small and middle market companies. With its flagship product, Acteon BudgetGuide™, Acteon is working to fill the gaps in business functionality left by most Enterprise Resource Management (ERM) and General Ledger (G/L) accounting applications. Acteon Technologies was founded in 2000 and is privately held.

For more information about Acteon Technologies and Acteon BudgetGuide, visit http://www. acteontechnologies. com (http://www. acteontechnologies. com).