Scottish Courage budgets with Comshare

NEWS UK brewing giant, Scottish Courage, is to roll-out budget and forecasting software from Comshare across its national network of businesses. In the first phase of implementation, Scottish Courage - which owns Courage, John Smith's, National Sales, Newcastle Breweries and Scottish Brewers - will connect between 50 and 100 finance staff before the end of August. Comshare's BudgetPlus software is Web-enabled to allow users to connect to a central Oracle database via a browser and password. Glen Davies, finance director at Courage, said the brewer was attracted by BudgetPlus' familiar spreadsheet interface. "Our finance community found it difficult to consolidate and build up forecasts for overheads and product margins using our transaction system and Lotus models," Davies said in a statement. "We needed a flexible, user-friendly solution with robust Web-based functionality." Once forecasts are complete, Scottish Courage plans to feed the data into its SAP system for comparison with information from across the rest of the business.