How to Make Financial Planning a Year-Round Process

There's no doubt that holding on to legacy planning technology and processes can cost your company more than it saves. That's especially true in today's data-driven, accelerated world where business agility is now a determining factor for success.

Instead, to think fast and move first, organizations must embrace a new, modern planning model or risk being left behind. Yet many financial pros are still bogged down in rigid, time-consuming spreadsheets and old-school annual planning cycles.

Cloud planning technology, meanwhile, can help companies uncover the key drivers that impact teams' performance-and identify the trends and market shifts that could hit the bottom line in the coming year. Taking a more active approach to financial planning also can give decision-makers the objective intel they need to invest in good opportunities or cut back on those that aren't performing well.

Making financial planning a continuous, year-round process helps companies make swifter, more strategic decisions. Here are three proven ways to create more dynamic financial plans that will improve your company's agility and help it reach its strategic goals.

Tactic No. 1: Focus on Strategy

Don't let yesterday's processes drive your company's current and future financial plans. If teams are focused on doing what they did last year, business performance will stagnate.

To succeed in a rapidly evolving marketplace, companies need a clear strategic vision-and a detailed plan to execute it. And that plan needs to be reviewed and updated on an ongoing basis.

But business leaders can't make responsive, strategic decisions without uniform data from across the organization. If teams are using multiple systems they'll lose valuable time logging into each program to collect, validate, and compare data. Everyone knows that manually aggregating data is an error-prone and time-consuming process. Yet many companies continue to house operational and financial data in separate systems.

Conversely, a central data repository acts as a convenient, single source of truth for accurate information about company performance. Cloud-based systems allow people from across the company to upload their team's data and gather information from other departments to inform their decisions.

With this type of tech, teams can stop wasting time debating whose data is right and focus on deciding which investments will do the most to help the company meet its strategic goals. When all departments are using the same dataset to achieve a shared strategy, the company will stop existing as a collection of independent cogs and become a cohesive business where everyone moves in tandem.

A centralized, cloud-based database also is always up to date and accurate, which lets leaders make decisions based on numbers they have confidence in. The right software will even automate the data collection process, eliminating the potential for human error. And if manual changes need to be made to reports, models, or forecasts, a central repository ensures updates are spread across all datasets instantly. That eliminates the need to make the same adjustment to multiple spreadsheets.

Tactic No. 2: Plan in Real Time

In today's business environment, market shifts can disrupt a business virtually overnight. And in these transformative times, static reporting can put your company at a significant disadvantage. When leaders need to decide how to respond to an immediate shift in the business landscape, months-old data won't be much use. What happened yesterday needs to be reflected in today's key performance indicators (KPIs).

For example, if a competitor suddenly emerges or releases a new product, leaders need to know what kind of threat that could pose to the company's market share. If they can easily access current figures, they can adapt on the fly. But if it takes days-or even weeks-to gather, verify, and analyze information, the business runs the risk of losing ground.

The ability to feed analytics models with fresher data is a key factor allowing successful financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams to take a more forward-looking approach. For companies to be competitive, they need access to real-time, structured, and unstructured data that is shared extensively across the enterprise.

In addition to real-time data, dashboard and modeling software can also provide insights into the factors doing the most to drive business results. Plus, cloud technology allows teams to self-report and drill into actuals without asking the finance team to run a custom dashboard. This lets business partners analyze their own performance data, such as the drivers influencing variance over the past few months. It also frees up the finance team to focus on creating forward-looking forecasts rather than managing a constant stream of one-off requests.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.