Empyrean Budgeting & Planning™
Designed specifically for banks and credit unions to support your budgeting, forecasting, strategic planning and scenario analysis needs, Empyrean Budgeting & Planning™ combines and integrates the best practices, tools, and approaches from Asset/Liability Management (ALM) with the collaborative planning processes needed for budgeting, planning and forecasting. The ability to enter and share both balance sheet and non-interest related assumptions at different product and account levels, and across multiple groups (e.g., Finance, Treasury, HR, IT, Marketing, lines of business, markets, departments and/or individual centers) creates a system with unprecedented planning accuracy and flexibility for the banking industry.
A Comprehensive Planning Platform
Through the sharing of data, assumptions and calculations with the industry’s leading ALM system, Empyrean Budgeting & Planning™ offers a comprehensive, robust and configurable set of capabilities supporting the planning processes in all the areas of the institution. Features include:
- Balance Sheet and Margin Planning: Empyrean’s Integrated Asset/Liability Based Planning (IABP)combines the sophisticated and detailed cash flow-based planning performed in Empyrean ALMTM, with the ability to directly capture growth, spread and product mix assumptions from your line of business experts, creating a truly unique process for balance sheet and margin planning.
- Non-Interest Income & Expense Planning: providing a set of planning and growth assumptions for both non-interest income and operating expenses, allowing for direct input by your managers through an easy-to- use, intuitive web-based interface.
- CAPEX and Prepaid Expense Planning: layer new fixed asset and prepaid expense requests on top of existing fixed assets, prepaid expenses and their corresponding depreciation and amortization schedules for complete planning directly within Empyrean; while also providing the ability to group expenses and plan by project.
- Payroll Planning: a flexible and configurable payroll planning process supporting either GL, job code or employee level planning. The system inherently applies payroll assumptions entered at aggregate levels to the level of detail desired by your institution for what is typically the largest non-interest expense item for most financial institutions.
Flexibility through configuration
Through our extensive experience working with hundreds of financial institutions, we recognize that every organization budgets and plans differently. Empyrean Budgeting & Planning™ is designed to allow your institution to plan the way you want to, at the level(s) that make the most sense for your organization; without requiring customizations. Empyrean Budgeting & Planning™ is an easily supportable software application that can be quickly upgraded as new releases and enhancements are introduced.
Intuitive, transparent and fast
The web-based application is explicitly designed to help both administrators and budget contributors easily enter, process, and analyze budget, plan, and actual data. The need to reduce the learning curve, to minimize training and to enable non-financial experts to navigate the system is cornerstone of the system’s design. At the same time, we recognize that data, calculations, and processes cannot be black boxes – you and your teams need access to detailed, auditable data and results. And finally, the system needs to be fast. In today’s volatile and ever-changing environment, you need answers quickly and efficiently. The processes can’t take hours to run, and your reports can’t take minutes to run. Empyrean Budgeting & Planning™ leverages the same processing technology and approaches that have enabled Empyrean ALM® to perform at speeds unprecedented in the industry.
Shared components and reporting / BI framework
Empyrean offers a suite of risk and performance management solutions that leverage the same data, security setup, calculation engines and a reporting / BI framework. The reporting / BI framework enables Empyrean to deliver pre-packaged budgeting and planning reports and dashboards, while also providing the flexibility for users to create custom analyses, dashboards and reports.
These shared components provide increased efficiency and consistency for users and report consumers across all applications. By leveraging a single data, calculation and reporting framework with other Empyrean risk and performance management solutions, and by providing a sophisticated, yet easy to manage set of rules for budgeting, planning and forecasting, Empyrean Planning enables your organization to focus on making decisions that will maximize return for your stakeholders, whether they be public or private shareholders, investors, members, etc.