Tips for Selecting the Right Planning, And Forecasting Technologies Most companies struggle with planning, budgeting, and forecasting as well as reporting. Planning is a critical area in managing business finance as well as other matters and can determine the success or failure of the business. However, the planning process takes time and is a huge burden to many companies. Businesses can address the obstacles by leveraging new technologies and employing the best practices in planning, budgeting, and forecasting. With the use of the right software, businesses are able to come up with accurate plans, timely forecasts, and few errors in the management policies. The software that you select should be able to support accepted best practices in financial planning. This helps enhance the reliability of the information and promotes participation by all departments in the organisation. In addition, it should enable the planners to align operating plans to strategic thinking. It should make it easy for the heads of departments to put together their objectives and ways to achieve the goals that the financial managers can eventually translate them into financial targets and the cost centers. The technology should be tied to the core business drivers that are used in the formulas. This use of past data does not take into account the challenges that the business is undergoing now and may give false results. However, the use of the drivers ensures consistency and promotes co-ordination across several business functions. The selected technology should also be one that enables consolidation and distribution of data in real time. Most of the time, the process of distribution in the budgeting process takes so long that by the time the planning process is being completed, the business relies on stale data. The use of real time consolidation shortens the planning cycles and deals with assumptions that lead to inaccurate forecasts and poor budgeting. Consider the use of software that comes with several best practices templates. It increases the speed of decision-making and reduces the risk of the implementation. Data is fed into the system quite fast, analyses and results given within the short time. The enterprise budgeting and forecasting tool should also be integrated and easily adapt as business scenarios change. It should also be efficient to give the financial managers less
headache when managing data. Moreover, it should also provide models for analysis that are relevant for the planning and forecasting needs of the business. Besides, the software should be easy to use and implement without lengthy training and need to hire specialists to run the system.
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