Questica Budget now features a new Advanced Calculation Engine
Enables public sector organizations to create complex modelling for revenue, projections, and activity-based costing.
BURLINGTON, ON, March 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - Questica, a leading provider of cloud-based budgeting, performance, transparency and engagement solutions is pleased to announce it's added a powerful solution-wide Advanced Calculation Engine to Questica Budget Suite to enable public sector organizations to create complex models for revenue, projections and activity-based costing.
Questica Budget is an end-to-end budget preparation and performance management software solution for public sector agencies looking to modernize how they budget, forecast, analyze and report on their operating, capital and salaries budgets.
Questica Budget's Advanced Calculation Engine (ACE) is a general purpose calculation system that enables users to create formulas ranging from a single formula in a cell up to large scale mathematical models to do things such as forecasting expenses and revenue from drivers and historical data. ACE's features are designed specifically for budgeting, which allows users to budget in a way that would be difficult in a traditional Excel spreadsheet system.
Questica Budget's ACE capabilities are based on three parts: QCode, Variables and Templates. QCode is a superset of Excel's calculation language; that means that any function that works in Excel should work in QCode, plus there are additional special functions just for budgeting. Users in finance departments and budget offices already know how to use Excel, and this makes the tool more user-friendly to learn. Variables allow users to calculate and share rates and values across an organization, while Templates permit users to package up calculation models so that they can be built once and used over and over, even by other departments.
"We work collaboratively with our customers to identify ways to better leverage the data and information within our solution to create one source of budget truth," said Craig Ross, Chief Revenue Officer at Questica. "ACE allows our government, education and healthcare users to compare multiple driver-based, what-if scenarios and assess the impacts of changes to the budget across their organizations. It strengthens collaboration among stakeholders by allowing complex and flexible formulas to be shared across departments and eliminate the need to email spreadsheets back and forth."
So how can this new ACE feature help an organization with their budgeting process? With ACE, an organization has a set of tools that can be used to calculate any kind of budget, including but not limited to, balancing a budget by generating the draws and contributions to reserves, and forecasting for expenses and revenues based on any number of program or service drivers. For example:
- A city could determine the expenses to resurface a stretch of road based on its type and length.
- A university could forecast revenue based on student enrollment for each program and course.
- A hospital could budget based on the number of patients and procedures. Later they can compare not only budget versus actual dollars of revenue, but also budget versus actual patients and procedures.
While ACE's calculation templates are a good fit for activity-based budgeting, they can do other types of functions, such as build an auto-balancing function for operating budgets to generate a draw and a push to and from reserves, and to calculate projections to year end based on historical actuals.
"It's important that Questica Budget is able to capture all the calculations, not just the results," states James Orr, Product Manager at Questica. "If a budget line was worked out using a rate times that quantity should be visible in the system. That's very empowering for our users. They can present a budget to stakeholders such as council or board members, staff, citizens or other constituents and be able to explain how they arrived at the budget numbers because the calculations are all in one place. Plus, they can update budgets quickly by changing the drivers instead of starting over."
For more information about ACE and Questica Budget Suite, please visit our website at questica.com, or schedule a personal demonstration with one of our budget professionals.
About Questica
As a leader of budgeting and preparation software since 1998, Questica's goal is to make public sector finance better for everyone. Almost 700 governments, colleges and universities, K-12 schools, hospitals and healthcare facilities, and non-profit organizations throughout North America have eliminated spreadsheets, opting for smarter planning, budgeting, management, transparency and engagement with our solutions. Questica is also named to the 2019 GovTech 100 top government companies listing with its sister organizations under GTY Technology.
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About GTY Technology Holdings Inc.
GTY Technology Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: GTYH) ("GTY")) brings leading government technology companies together to achieve a new standards in citizen engagement and resource management. Through its six subsidiaries, GTY offers an intuitive cloud-based suite of solutions for state and local governments spanning functions in procurement, payments, grant management, budgeting, and permitting: Bonfire provides strategic sourcing and procurement software to enable confident and compliant spend; CityBase provides government payment solutions to connect constituents with utilities and government agencies; eCivis offers a grant management system to maximize grant revenues and track performance; Open Counter provides government payment software to guide applicants through complex permitting and licensing procedures; Questica offers budget preparation management and transparency software to deliver on financial and non-financial strategic objectives; Sherpa provides public sector budgeting software and consulting services.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The combined company's actual results may differ from GTY's and the combined company's expectations, estimates and projections and, consequently, you should not rely on these forward looking statements as predictions of future events. Words such as "expect," "estimate," "project," "budget," "forecast," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "may," "will," "could," "should," "believes," "predicts," "potential," "continue," and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, the combined company's expectations with respect to future performance and anticipated impacts of the business combination. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from the expected results. Most of these factors are outside of the combined company's control and are difficult to predict. Factors that may cause such differences include, but are not limited to: (1) the risk that the business combination disrupts current plans and operations; (2) the ability to recognize the anticipated benefits of the business combination, which may be affected by, among other things, competition, the ability of the combined company to grow and manage growth profitably and retain its key employees; (3) costs related to the business combination; (4) the outcome of the New York and California lawsuits among the Company, OpenGov, Inc. and the other parties thereto, as well as any other legal proceedings that may be instituted against the combined company in connection with the business combination; (5) the inability to maintain the listing of the combined company's common stock on The Nasdaq Stock Market; (6) changes in applicable laws or regulations; (7) the possibility that GTY may be adversely affected by other economic, business, and/or competitive factors; (8) any government shutdown which impacted the ability of customers to purchase GTY's products and services; and (9) other risks and uncertainties included in the final proxy statement/prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") on January 31, 2019 , including those under "Risk Factors" therein, and in GTY's other filings with the SEC. We caution you that the foregoing list of factors is not exclusive, and readers should not place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. We do not undertake or accept any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in our expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based.
SOURCE Questica
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