AOP

Every year at company which I will title Smart Solutions (to keep their financials confidential), the company has to go through a long, drawn-out process to produce the Annual Operating Plan (AOP). This consists of all revenue and expense projections from which the company will be held accountable.

The process requires that every department head submit their projected budget for the upcoming year. Up to this point, there hasn’t been a formalized spreadsheet where the department heads could submit their projected heads. Instead, they have been given a blank Income Statement and have been tasked to complete the Income Statement for their respective department.

Given the complexity of an Income Statement, there has been much confusion over the past few years during this annual planning cycle. Department heads have been hoping for a simpler solution to complete this annual process.

The solution to the problem is the project submission. Instead of having to convert all of their expenses into an income statement, the template instead allows department heads to easily input relative expenses in categories. The layout is easily understood allowing managers with little to no experience to effectively budget for their upcoming year.

After department heads input their relative budgets, they can then select a button in the ribbon which will automatically calculate their Income Statement. After doing so, the managers can then click another button which will download historical journal entries from an external spreadsheet, calculate a historical Income Statement, and then allow the department heads to compare next year’s budget with the current year’s actual expenses.

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/12f/philw/Final_Project_Write-up.pdf
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/12f/philw/Final_Project.xlsm
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/12f/philw/Data.xlsx