Why Now is the Time to Move From Manual to Modern Planning
Over the past few years finance has played an increasingly strategic role within the wider organization, becoming the go-to team for actionable insights. Now longer a siloed unit, your finance team has been saddled with the unenviable task of navigating the organization through rough waters. Constant market changes have increased pressure on faster, more accurate forecasting and reporting to inform rapid decision-making. You now must connect organizational data and enable agility across all relevant stakeholders if you hope to achieve profitability.
Knowing this, your financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams need access to comprehensive and accurate data from various sources within the organization, including ERP systems, CRM data, operational metrics, and market trends. By connecting and integrating data from disparate sources, you can gain a holistic view of the business and make informed decisions based on reliable information. Modern finance leaders like yourself must invest in the right technology to effectively connect data for real-time planning and analysis.
Traditional Budgeting Processes Don’t Work Anymore
Today, finance teams must be agile and responsive to changes in market conditions, customer preferences, and internal factors. Traditional budgeting and planning processes are too slow to enable agility; manual copy/paste processes are tedious and error prone and static spreadsheets are out of date before the data has even been finalized.
Unfortunately, managers in many organizations delay dealing with this problem until the pain of working with existing manual processes simply becomes too great. Inaccurate forecasts, missed budget deadlines, and breakdowns in communication often serve as the catalysts that finally motivate leaders in the business to make necessary changes. However, by investing in modern planning solutions earlier, you can set your organization on the right path before reaching crisis levels.
Implementing budgeting and planning software to streamline repetitive tasks and workflows enables your finance team to eliminate manual processes and minimize errors. The right tool will seamlessly integrate data from various financial sources, such as ERP systems, CRM platforms, and external market data, to provide a comprehensive and unified business view, enabling your team to analyze a broader dataset, resulting in more accurate insights and plans.
Automation can help you improve efficiency, accelerate processes, and free up valuable time for your team to focus on more strategic activities. By leveraging technology to automate planning processes, you can deploy real-time data analytics, scenario modeling, and forecasting capabilities. This gives your leaders the agility to quickly adapt their plans and strategies to changing circumstances, seize opportunities, and mitigate risks effectively.
Manual to Modern: Excel Budgeting Revolutionized
Download NowChoose the Right Solution to Modernize Your Planning Process
Bizview from insightsoftware is a robust, web-based planning solution that increases cadences, facilitates collaboration, and simplifies processes to drive smarter decisions from more accurate data. Easy configuration of planning forms, reports, and dashboards, coupled with driver-based models, makes it simple to extend planning beyond finance.
Bizview allows you to accelerate business growth with collaborative and connected planning, budgeting, and forecasting. Its familiar spreadsheet-like interface offers anywhere, anytime data access on any device, without having to manage multiple spreadsheets and versions. Powerful workflows, automated emails, and multi-level approvals shrink cycle times to enable continuous planning and rolling forecasts.
- Shrink Planning Cycles: Implement an agile planning process to enhance budgeting and forecasting accuracy, shorten cycle times, and improve team productivity. Automate tasks, monitor forecasts, and adopt a repeatable, standardized process. Create models that reflect business operations, including top-down, bottom-up, zero-based, and hybrid budgeting models.
- Develop Accurate, Integrated Plans: Ensure accuracy and strategic impact by integrating planning across departments and extending it to other business areas using driver-based planning and advanced forecasting models. Enable frontline workers to take part in planning processes, creating a variety of budgets and forecasts.
- Scale With Your Business: Scale your solution with ease, streamline communication with integrated workflows, analytics, and dashboards, and gain control with built-in multilevel approvals for efficient planning processes. Boost productivity and reduce errors with powerful spread rules, system-proposed forecasting based on actuals and other variables, and automatic consolidation of data.
- Consolidate Planning and Reporting: Create comprehensive reports and dashboards for financial statements, multi-company reporting, operational consolidation, and currency management, enabling quick decision-making across organizations by bridging the gap between financial and operational details.
- Get Up and Running Fast: Leverage prebuilt connectors and content to get up and running fast. Easily configure forms, reports, and dashboards to tailor your solution as needed along the way. Enjoy a fast time to value thanks to the intuitive, browser-based, Excel-like interface that builds on your existing skills.
Don’t wait for manual planning processes to cause inaccuracies, missed budget deadlines, and communication breakdowns. With the right planning solution, your FP&A team can enhance their effectiveness in planning, analysis, and decision-making, ultimately contributing to the financial success and profitability of the organization. To learn more, Read our whitepaper on making the business case for early technology investments to give your organization an easy roadmap from manual to modern planning processes.
From Manual to Modern Planning Processes: Making the Business Case
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