Planning is the art of turning Complexity into Clarity

Labour is your biggest expense. The act of Manual Data Processing; Gathering, Formatting, Consolidation, and Reporting should be eliminated, freeing up staff for more profitable, strategic activities.  

A Great FP&A Planning Tool uses embedded role-based workflow, with timely real-time notifications, for seamless automation of data, throughout the entire planning process, across all stakeholders.

Time is Money. Without stating the obvious, not giving your staff the right tools to be their most productive selves is short-sighted, and foolish. Many organisations still use .xls - a 40 year old inferior data tool. Whilst we all love .xls for manipulating data, it is fraught with manual effort, risk, and complexity - ill suited to the task of dealing with Financial Planning Challenges.

A Great FP&A Planning Tool should be easy to use, powerful in its capabilities, and fast in its results. 

Static Planning is when unhappy, overworked staff constantly struggle to collaborate, gather and compile data, to try and deliver insights that has a meaningful impact on the business. These financial planning challenges leaves very little time for the 'Why?' of any data activity - deriving accurate, meaningful insights for agile decision-making.  

A Great FP&A Planning Tool should deliver visually pleasing, easy-to-read, easy-to-manipulate, slice-and-dice insights. Through real-time access to relevant, quality information across your business, decision makers can pivot quickly, to meet the market.

Information is Power, and Control assigns it. Information Hoarding is a known phenomena in most organisations, and the price is paid exponentially.  Analytics is restrained from the greater organisation, denying insights and severely limiting the ability of a company to address financial planning challenges head on. 

A Great FP&A Planning Tool covers all disciplines within your business, and allows you to make comprehensive buy, build or borrow decisions with facts on-hand, not simply intuition. 

A finance team seeking to create accurate forecasts from multiple systems with millions of data points, with only .xls  as its weapon, is doomed to fail. With an inferior planning tool, cumbersome to operate, long-term forecasts that may become quickly outdated or inaccurate. To re-forecast is a tedious, time consuming affair - often redundant and meaningless once created. 

A Great FP&A Planning Tool meets these financial planning challenges head on, by enabling businesses to regularly update and refine their forecasts, based on real-time data and market insights. This helps in making more accurate predictions, improving resource allocation, and reducing the risk of under, or overestimating demand.

Collaboration is assumed, but never a given in any organisation. To cope with ever present financial planning challenges, it is often a single finance individual, assigned to FP&A, and tasked to get timely data from across  the organisation. Different departments or teams work in silos within an organisation, as they have entirely different priorities, and being interrogated is not exactly relished - leading to a lack of alignment.

A Great FP&A Planning Tool promotes cross-functional collaboration and ensures that all teams are aligned and working towards shared objectives. It also shows contribution to company goals. This facilitates better coordination, communication, and resource utilisation within the organisation. 

You cannot manage what you cannot measure, and data is at the heart of it. If the data is not accessible, and of good quality, any FP&A effort is futile. Most businesses reply on tedious imports, resulting in stale, unusable data from that point forward. 

A Great FP&A Planning Tool allows businesses to easily access quality data, from an unlimited number of repositories, in real-time. It can also sync in real time with your favourite Microsoft tools.

Allocating resources is a key feature an FP&A planning tool. Sitting outside this are staff using outdated .xls, trying to wring functionality it was never meant for.  Aside from the obvious risk to the business, it also devalues the employee by severely limiting their planning potential to mainly operational planning, resulting in resources being either under-utilised or mis-allocated. 

A Great FP&A Planning Tool elevates staff to all take ownership of planning, in an easy-to-use manner that encourages strategic thinking.  It gives them the tools to understand the impact that their activity has on the greater business.  

Traditional planning methods may overlook potential risks or fail to adequately address them. It may also, at the most basic level, put the entire organisation at risk through use of inferior planning tools such as .xls.

A Great FP&A Planning Tool incorporates risk assessment and management as an integral part of the planning process. By regularly evaluating risks and implementing appropriate mitigation strategies, businesses can reduce their exposure to potential threats and ensure continuity in times of disaster.

Customer preferences and needs evolve over time, and businesses must adapt to meet these changing demands. Often planning has no bearing on how the suggested changes will impact your revenues over time, creating even greater financial planning challenges in future. 

A Great FP&A Planning Tool emphasises customer-centricity by continuously monitoring customer feedback, market trends, and competitive dynamics. This enables businesses to align their strategies and offerings with evolving customer expectations, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

What is your adherence to your organisational KPI's? Traditional planning approaches may not provide timely visibility into performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).  This is essential for decision making, and to meet financial planning challenges head-on. 

A Great FP&A Planning Tool  incorporates a wide variety of KPI's, performance and baseline monitoring and reporting - allowing businesses to track progress, identify areas for improvement, and take corrective actions promptly. 

Are you able to capitalise on emerging opportunities, and respond quickly to market shifts? More often than not, the final answer is no.  

A Great FP&A Planning Tool enables businesses to identify and seize opportunities as they arise, leveraging real-time insights and data-driven decision-making. This helps businesses stay ahead of the competition and maximize growth potential.