If your company’s fiscal year has just begun, congratulations on getting through your annual planning process and finalizing your budget for the new year! With the stress and hard work (and hopefully board approval as well) behind you, it’s worth a little celebrating … or maybe a lot of celebrating if you need to numb the pain a little.
From my own FP&A experience, I know how it can be – long days and nights (and maybe weekends), late demands for revisions, broken spreadsheet links, feeling like a zombie by the time final presentations come around. After all that, I’ve felt like enjoying an extra glass or two of champagne – or something stronger.
How smoothly did your process go this time around? How well did your planning software perform? Are you satisfied with the result – a budget that will drive performance and help attain the year’s business goals?
Planning processes can be constrained by the software systems that are supposed to support them. By combining an effective process and well-designed solution, you could see a big improvement in the quality and relevance of your budgets and forecasts, not to mention in the process itself.
In your most recent planning cycle:
- How quickly were you able to turn around plan revisions?
- Did your system support collaboration with the business decision-makers, to enhance quality and ownership of the plan?
- Were the most relevant drivers captured and used to calculate financial results?
- Were past actual results available to provide recent trends to help build and review your plan?
- Was commentary easily gathered and used to explain planning assumptions?
- How well did your software manage the interdependencies between revenue, cost and expenses, as well as between business units, to provide you with integrated and accurate pro-forma financials?
- Were you able to evaluate a variety of business scenarios including major market assumptions, new products, reorganizations, acquisitions, etc.?
Here at Analysis Team, we understand planning from a business/financial perspective, so we “get” the process and we’re quick studies on the nuances of our clients’ particular needs. We have significant experience implementing and optimizing solutions with Oracle’s Hyperion Planning, PBCS and Essbase, and Applied OLAP’s Dodeca. By working closely with our clients’ FP&A teams and IT staff, we design solutions that meet planning needs and provide a relevant baseline for performance measurement throughout the year.
For a little more planning hangover cure, please take a look at another recent blog post, “Enterprise Planning: Don’t Just Automate It, Improve the Process”.
We’d be happy to discuss with you some ideas for improvements so the next time around won’t drive you to drink. Feel free to reach out.
What would you like to celebrate a year from now? Cheers!