FP&A, IT Budgeting, Jedox

What was not justified was how little visibility anyone had over it. Each of the eight business units tracked IT costs independently, in its own format, using its own categorisation logic. One unit organised by vendor. Another by project. A third split costs along capex and opex lines that did not match corporate Finance's chart of accounts. None of these formats were wrong on their own — they just had no common ground, which meant consolidation at the group level required someone to manually reconcile eight different structures every time leadership asked a budget question.

The intended approval process — IT Lead sets direction, BU Admin builds the budget, Product Owner approves at the application level — had never been formalised beyond an org chart. In practice, approvals moved through email, were sometimes verbal, and were documented only when a purchase order needed closing. Nobody was being careless. The process simply had no infrastructure behind it — so every time leadership asked a budget question, someone had to go and build the answer from scratch.

SAP S/4HANA held accurate, timely financial actuals. But the IT budgeting work upstream was entirely disconnected from it. The two worlds only met at month-end close, through a manual export and a manually built comparison. By the time a variance surfaced, it was already history.

"We knew roughly what we were spending. 'Roughly' was the problem."

— IT Planning Lead

Ownership at the application level. Process with actual teeth.

Finlytyx mapped IT spend to the SBU responsible for each tool before building anything. Adobe costs were assigned to the design and marketing functions. Autodesk to engineering and construction. Shared infrastructure — IBM, analytics — was allocated centrally with defined distribution rules. Every budget line had a named owner, a cost category that matched the corporate chart of accounts, and a position in the approval hierarchy.

The three-tier approval workflow was then built into the platform. Each role had a defined scope: the IT Lead could see consolidated spend across all SBUs but could not override a BU's own numbers. BU Admins worked within their unit without access to others. Product Owners approved within their authority and no further. The workflow that had previously lived in email now had controlled access, visible status, and a full audit trail.

Forecast versioning was introduced — Budget, Latest Estimate, and Reforecast as distinct versions running in parallel, with history preserved. For the first time, Finance could show not just the current number but how it had moved over the course of the year, and why.

The SAP S/4HANA connection was handled through ETL integration. When a cost was posted in SAP, it was immediately visible against the corresponding IT budget line in the planning environment — no manual download, no re-categorisation, no lag. The reconciliation work that had consumed days of Finance time each month was gone.

"Seeing actuals map directly to our budget lines, without anyone preparing a report — that was genuinely new for us."

— Finance Director

Less time preparing numbers. More time using them.

The monthly IT budget report had required two to three days of consolidation work. It became a live view — group-level spend, drillable to SBU, drillable to application, available without asking anyone to prepare anything.

The IT Lead, for the first time, had a real-time view of budget requests across all eight SBUs — their status, who had approved, what was pending. Requests that once disappeared into email threads now had a clear position in a process that everyone could see.

Mid-year planning conversations changed character. The group could compare the current Latest Estimate against the original Budget and trace any variance back to a specific SBU, a specific application, a specific quarter. That level of traceability had not existed before. Budget meetings that had previously started with thirty minutes of number reconciliation could now start with the actual question.

Where this tends to happen.

This is not a problem that belongs to real estate specifically. Any organisation managing enterprise IT costs across multiple divisions — with SAP or a comparable ERP as the financial backbone — runs some version of this risk if the planning layer above it has no structure. The spend grows, the tool count grows, and the informal processes that worked when the organisation was smaller stop scaling.

The point where it becomes urgent is usually a budget overrun with no clean explanation, a technology programme generating new IT costs faster than anyone is tracking them, or a board-level question about IT governance that Finance cannot answer from a single source. If any of those feel familiar, the problem is almost certainly in the planning layer — not the data.

About Finlytyx AI Labs

Finlytyx AI Labs is a Jedox consulting and implementation partner working with mid-market and enterprise organisations on financial planning, IT budgeting, and management reporting. We are based in Kochi, Kerala, with delivery experience across South Asia and the Middle East.