Do you know what I hate? Spreadsheets. I don’t mean the fairly benign spreadsheets that format a table nicely or provide a good way to analyze numbers for a research project. I’m talking about the awful spreadsheets that businesses use to track and share important information on a long term basis.

I find them everywhere…I’ll meet with new customer and learn about a 16 tab spreadsheet that stores the full department budget. And then I see all the *other* project-specific spreadsheets that project managers email to their department leader. And then I meet the poor sap in charge of gathering all those spreadsheets together and manually copying numbers to the master spreadsheet….every. single. week. And then a little part of me dies.

Enough! After all, the Force.com platform is all about killing spreadsheets…taking all that valuable data and putting it in the cloud: a secure, scalable, always-available platform. So here’s your answer.

Budget Management for Projects…Now with Chatter!

Stop tracking budgets with spreadsheets and give your managers a tool that effectively displays their projects’ financial standing: how much has been allocated (delineated by your custom-defined accounting codes) and how much has been spent against each budget item. Budget Management for Projects is a native application built on the Force.com platform. That means that it works right within your Salesforce.com environment or can be loaded as a stand-alone application on Force.com. With this tool, and all project budgets defined centrally and consistently, executives can finally get an accurate reading of project health: what projects are currently running, where are the potential overages, and more. Data is always up-to-date and readily accessible via built-in metrics dashboards.

Not enough? How about a built-in social platform using Salesforce.com’s Chatter. If you’re particularly interested in a project, follow it…and you’ll receive notifications about that project right within your Chatter feed. Watch that feed within the application, or hook up with Chatter desktop or Chatter for your iPhone/iPad.

Want to Learn More?

Check it out on the Salesforce AppExchange and load the 30-day free trial.

How to Purchase

You can download Budget Management for Projects directly from the Salesforce AppExchange. You’ll have 30 days to try it out and see if it’s a good fit for your business. Once you’re ready, click the Buy Now link below and select the number of user licenses you’d like to activate.

Demonstration