Centage Corporation: A Leading Provider of Strategic Budgeting and Planning Software Solutions for SMBs

“Headquartered just west of Boston, MA, Centage’s Budget Maestro suite of solutions empowers thousands of financial leaders with greater insight into their business performance and increases confidence in their decisions.”

Despite significant advancements in the delivery of financial management tools, many financial professionals at small to midsize organizations continue to struggle with the time consuming and error prone process of relying on Excel spreadsheets for financial management. Recognizing the opportunity to free financial professionals from the shackles of this archaic approach, Centage Corporation developed Budget Maestro, a unique suite of products designed to automate the budgeting, planning, forecasting and reporting process for small to midsize organizations. Delivered on premise or via the cloud, Budget Maestro empowers today’s financial professionals with unprecedented insight into the financial data they use to make
critical strategic business decisions.

Founded in 2001, Centage recently closed out 2015 with a blockbuster fourth quarter. Year-over-year billings were up nearly 50 percentin Q4 2015 and demand for the cloud-based version of its flagship product, Budget Maestro, continued to explode; accounting for over 50 percent of all sales in the quarter. Recognized as a Core Vendor in BPM Partners annual BPM Pulse report for the second year in a row,
Centage’s suite of budgeting, planning, forecasting, and analytics tools were designed to extend the same features and functionality financial professionals at large enterprises have access to, to the SMB market to help improve the financial performance of their organizations.

The Budget Maestro suite of products including Budget Maestro, Link Maestro, and Analytics Maestro, help companies move beyond Excel spreadsheets and formulas, to streamline their processes, make more informed business decisions, and improve ROI.

Budget Maestro Suite of Products

• Budget Maestro – designed to automate time-consuming activities in the budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting and analysis process.
• Analytics Maestro – provides formula-free financial dashboard reporting. Extracting key data from Budget Maestro and leading back office systems, including all General Ledger data, this financial analytics tool drives better decision making and increased accountability throughout the organization.
• Link Maestro- automates the exchange of financial information between the accounting/ERP system and Budget Maestro, making it quick and easy to start the budgeting process and conduct month-end variance reporting and analysis.

Delivering Strategic Financial Management Tools for the SMB Market
A Gold winner in the 2015 Golden Bridge Awards for Innovation in Business Process Management, Budget Maestro features powerful built-in business and financial logic that automatically creates all of the journal entries behind financial transactions. As a result, customers can create budget models in days, rather than weeks, and, they are freed from the time consuming, error prone data entry process that spreadsheet based financial management imposes. The built-in logic also generates the debits and credits associated with accounting transactions and allows users to generate an integrated forecasted Balance Sheet closely tied to the P&L budget at the push of a button, which is unique in the industry. It ensures a future period balance sheet is accurate and complete, GAAP compliant, and automatically updated every time even the slightest change to a budget line item is made whether based on actuals or assumptions.

Budget Maestro also seamlessly integrates directly with any GL system, allowing customers to quickly and easily import a trial balance to use as the basis for building a plan. This powerful feature is ideal for first time users who are working on their annual budget cycle and it can also be used at any point during the year to import an existing budgeting model and run unlimited “what-if” scenarios for planning purposes to see, within minutes, the implications to balance sheet and cash flow of any forecast model. The GLs chart of accounts is also enforced inside all budget and planning scenarios.

7,000 Users Worldwide Rely on Centage
With 7,000 users worldwide, Centage’s next generation budgeting and forecasting software and services are designed to meet the unique requirements of small to mid-sized businesses without the associated complexity and cost of more elaborate software. Customers span all industries, but Centage maintains a strong foothold in the Non-Profit, Healthcare and Manufacturing industries. Clients include Houston Food Bank, Wagner CAT Asia Equipment, Momentum M3 Midstream Energy,Napa Valley Recycling and Waste Services, and Pumps, Parts & Service Inc.

Centage Provides Foundation for Strategic Financial Management
“We always knew what we wanted from a budgeting software solution and Budget Maestro allowed me to finally execute on that vision. By providing a blank canvas, with deep features and functionality, we were able to customize the software to meet the unique requirements of my organization. We forecast at a relatively granular level, planning our revenue and employee costs at a per staff member level. Now, I am in a strategic position to support key stakeholders with critical financial insight,”said Scott Elliott, Controller for Macias Gini & O’Connell LLP (MGO).” Budget Maestro has empowered us to establish forward thinking processes in the financial management of our people.”

MGO is ranked as one of the top CPA firms in the nation by Accounting Today and Inside Public Accounting, and the firm was awarded the ‘Best of Accounting’ designation in Client Satisfaction by the independent research firm, Inavero.

Case Study: Loftness Specialized Equipment Relies on Centage to Automate Spreadsheet Based Approach to Financial Management
A leader in the specialized equipment industry, Loftness provides top Land, Vegetation and Agricultural Management professionals from around the world, the Loftness Logix Line of equipment to increase efficiencies, saving customers valuable time and money. For CFO & Controller Dave Davis, automating the budgeting and forecasting process was critical to create efficiencies among his own finance department. With a history of relying on excel spreadsheets to manage the budget Dave knew he needed to make a change to more strategically support the objectives of his growing organization. Having relied on Budget Maestro at his two previous employers, Dave knew it was the only solution with the flexibility to address his specific industry requirements.

“With more than 20 years as a financial professional, I keenly understand the challenges a spreadsheet based approach to budgeting and forecasting can present,” said Dave Davis, Controller, Loftness Specialized Equipment. “Having relied on Budget Maestro at three different organizations, it is the best solution I have found for manufacturing organizations to more easily and reliably budget and plan for the future. I trust Centage as an invaluable partner in ensuring the financial health of my organization.”

In 2015, Dave was named the 2015 CFO Leadership Award winner by Ventana Research. He was recognized for his success in spearheading a strategic IT initiative to automate his organization’s spreadsheet-based budgeting and forecasting process.

Looking in to the Future
Centage’s mission is to provide financial professionals with the most strategic, sophisticated, yet easy to use, budgeting, planning, forecasting, and analytics solutions on the market to effectively manage the financial health of their organizations. It anticipates the customer adoption trajectory to continue in 2016 as momentum for the cloud-based version of Budget Maestro continues and the company adds critical new functionality to its comprehensive platform.

Meet the President & CEO – Barry Clapp
Barry brings over 30 years of experience in sales, marketing, and business management of technology based businesses to Centage. Beginning with IBM, he has held a succession of jobs with increasing responsibility in software and Internet related businesses. At DigitalGlobe, a satellite imagery company where he served as vice president, he was responsible for $25 million in worldwide sales and support. As Vice President at Advanced Electron Beams, a venture-backed maker of electron beam generation equipment for the environmental and sterilization industries, he managed and grew worldwide sales. Most recently, he served as a strategic consultant to accelerate high growth of several early-stage companies, including Boston Technologies, a supplier of hosted services and high-volume transaction processing and execution for the foreign exchange trading market. As President and CEO of Source Recovery Company, an enterprise software tools company, he negotiated its sale to Allen Systems in 2000. Barry has a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration (Summa Cum Laude) from Nichols College and an MBA (with Honors) from Babson College.

“We are dedicated to providing exceptional value and customer service to our clients.”