BUDGETING PROCESS AUTOMATION AND DEPARTMENTAL INTEGRATION

Building an annual budget can be a very tedious task and is something done by every company, in every industry, all around the world. In the petroleum industry this process is usually done by combining spreadsheets from multiple departments (drilling program, projected future production and workovers, capital and operational expenses, land and legal, etc.) which can become cumbersome and confusing. Allowing this process to be automated will not only remove the confusion and propensity for error, it will increase the overall efficiency of a companys operational efforts which ultimately corresponds to more dollars earned. In order to create an application that allows us to automate the budgeting process, we must first define each step into a serious of logical steps. These logical steps are performed by the human component, or user, each time a budgeting sheet is created, and by defining these steps into a serious of interactive areas of an application, the user need only select a piece of data from a menu or click to add data that will applied to the budget. After defining the steps that are required to build a budget, we must then define how each department that contributes the budget will communicate. This will allow us to help Reservoir Engineering communicate future production with Accounting quickly and easily without training in various applications currently in use. Limitations that this application will unavoidably face come from a companys need to customize their budgeting process to fit their needs. With ever company there will be requests for features that may or may not add to another companys experience of the product. This paper will then describe a dynamically changing application that can allow companies to meet their experience requirements so long as the usefulness of the request could potentially be universal. Through the development and deployment of this application, companies will enjoy increased efficiency in their budgeting process while allowing for each department to communicate their contribution more easily. With increased communication and application based data sharing, companies will quickly see a decrease in the number of small mistakes made when working with a large group. In the end, the efficiency added by automating the budgeting process will bring the industry to a new level of managing business.