It is just mid-Feb. Isn’t it too late to revise your 2020 budget?
No. It depends on how agile you are in consolidating your corporate decisions of the CFO, CEO, the Board of Directors and department heads.
Amid the turbulences in the company operation in times of uncertainties, your team being the Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) play a crucial role to provide more strategic value and insights for its organization in meeting the business challenges ahead.
With many marketing plans delayed, shipment cancelled and supplier did not resume production to meet your production schedule, it is never too late to fine tune the approach to planning and budgeting for contingency.
Here are three ways to efficiently manage your budgeting and planning process:
1. Increase collaboration.
Financial collaboration becomes easier when stop relying on static spreadsheets. It starts with getting the entire team working with one, trusted set of numbers, and building on a foundation of accurate, up-to-date data. Teams should collaborate to eliminate version control issues and establish role-based permissions that enable process owners to control who can access and edit data.
2. Become more agile.
While different teams and their heads are taking turns to work remote, the volume and complexity of data collection & consolidation is making Finance’s work even harder. It is almost impossible to discuss, understand and get a consolidated budget revision from each stakeholder and present to the management in a timely manner, not to say respond to the business contingency. But once there is an automated data collection process in place and data integrity is ensured, you end up with a harmonized and accurate view of the business. Not only will this save your time but will also allow all background, rationale and relevant information to get to management more quickly and accurately.
3. Enrich your data analysis.
Using modeling techniques, predictive analytics, multiple ‘what if’ scenarios and rolling forecasts as part of the planning and budgeting process can help minimize uncertainty in the business. FP&A professionals are able to be more responsive in a fast-moving market and are able to deliver reliable analysis and operational reports to more accurately facilitate decision-making.
How to accomplish this?
For the complex dynamic planning and reporting organizations require, a shared spreadsheet cannot cater for the analysis requirement realtime. FP&A ends up spending the bulk of its time verifying that the numbers are up to date and accurate. As a result, the team doesn’t have time to work with stakeholders to deliver insightful analysis that will really help in planning for company’s contingency move or grab the growth opportunities.
NetSuite Planning and Budgeting facilitates both company-wide and departmental planning with modeling capabilities, approval workflows and reporting within one collaborative scalable solution. To enable decision makers working remotely and as effectively, a cloud-based planning and budgeting solution makes data accessible, in real-time, to everyone who needs to view and use such information. Data and insight accessibility ensure remote participation and accountability for your business continuity with your investment in planning & budgeting solution.
Check out more from this ebook High Impact Planning and Budgeting for all Types of Growth or schedule a demo with our consultant for free.
