Performance Management: When Spreadsheets are not enough…

A company’s ability to effectively execute the process of budgeting, forecasting and planning is a huge driver of corporate success. As you know, there are many difficulties that can interfere with such processes in many organizations. A ponderous manual budget process combined with the problematic coordination with line managers often causes the information to be outdated before it can be utilized. Working with spreadsheets and normal email collaboration is a good solution but only up to a certain point. Eventually, due to the complexity of business markets as well as the competitive landscape all businesses are facing,there need to be better solutions.

Typical Problems with Spreadsheet ONLY based planning

While spreadsheets and email can be an effective medium for planning, budgeting and forecasting up to a point, eventually they can lead to a technology bottleneck. Manual spreadsheet activities such as tracking down numbers, troubleshooting broken links and looking for macro failures can be tedious. This is time that could be used for more important strategic purposes.

Adding insult to injury, these systems and the files contained in them are often not centralized, so versioning can become an administrative nightmare. Changes undocumented with the entire team may cause the team to waste time looking for data inconsistencies and who made the entries. Even when time stamps are verified, you must first know what file to look at. Is this how you want to use your resources?

Is there another way?

Fortunately, such nightmarish scenarios can be mitigated and ultimately resolved by properly automating budgeting, planning, and forecasting. Imagine a budgeting processthat takes days, rather than months to complete with the functionality to run what-if scenarious to test your intuition against changing market conditions. What if these projections could be run accurately within a day? Where this can be done, the benefits of using a Financial Performance Management system becomes obvious and a “must-have’ for corporate success.

By automating your budgeting and planning with Financial Performance Management you can:

• Easily make and evaluate various business scenarios.
• Quickly Evaluate various market conditions, business drivers, and rates.
• Establish centralized and sophisticated business models that are able to support whole organization budgeting by connecting all business units.
• Quickly View real-time data to assess financial performance.
• Easily collaborate around Financial Information throughout the organization.

Try Financial Performance Management

Financial Performance Management solutions are a game changer for organizations who effectively leverage their power. As a Financial professional, having more time to analyze information is, obviously, a huge advantage.

Taking more time to look at historical data and forecasting what is possible will make your company’s finance strategies more effective. Additionally, there will be an increase of the quality of knowledge work from these professionals since they are able to better focus their mental energy towards meaningful analysis rather than mind numbing manual manipulations of spreadsheets or other administrative processes.

Being able to quickly create, test, and analyze business scenarios, market conditions, and business drivers give companies the speed and agility they need during these turbulent market conditions. Additionally, the centralized nature of Performance Management solutions allow companies to harness the value of all financial and operational data from their organization allowing stakeholders to get a real-time holistic view of their business. This would be a nightmare to coordinate and manage using just spreadsheets and email for collaboration.

Performance Management is a must for growing enterprises, mid-market companies, and beyond in order to stay competitive. Organizations are increasingly implementing Performance Management solutions, and for good reason. If you get on the bandwagon before your competitors, you’ll have a huge advantage. On the other hand if they beat you to the punch, you’ll be fighting with one hand behind your back.

For more info about automating your budgeting, planning, and forecasting with a Financial Performance Management solution check out the white paper.