Scale down for big results
By Derik Rothman, Director at Futuresense
When it comes to financial systems, every company has different needs. This makes implementing a system that works an exercise in customisation, and many organisations are under the mistaken impression that this is more challenging than it is.
In fact, many companies choose to keep growing their financial teams instead of investing in the technologies and solutions that will speed up and improve their processes.
While a skilled team is invaluable, one that requires increasing amounts of time and manpower to do the job becomes inefficient and ineffective. You will find that in organisations where the team keeps growing, the person making the decisions isn’t the one actually doing the work, so they don’t realise the strain that the team is under.
Budgeting and planning, in particular, can be onerous when the business relies on multiple spreadsheets extended across multiple divisions and departments. While spreadsheets can be great personal productivity tools, their lack of control, auditability and scale dilute planning processes because, rather than leveraging planning processes to collaborate with key stakeholders, finance teams are often forced to spend time on low-value tasks, such as moving and reconciling data and checking reports for accuracy.
Organisations should be looking to replace numerous manual spreadsheets, oversized teams, and disconnected budgeting and planning processes with a software solution that can offer a unified platform, enabling their finance teams to translate their analyses into actionable insights to support key decisions. We have seen how important agility is to businesses of all sizes and from all sectors in a volatile environment. Without an effective planning solution in place, staying ahead of today’s fast-changing business demands is an extremely difficult task.
Agility requires a way to plan within a much shorter timeframe. Annual plans are no longer relevant when things change on almost a monthly basis, and three-year forecasts are certainly no longer useful to any business. Similarly, looking into the past to predict the future has become as futile as planning based on guesses.
With one unified financial planning system, forecasts and budgets can happen in seconds or minutes, rather than days or weeks. With one unified financial planning system, uncertainty is reduced, while accountability and security are improved. As a result of the fact that all data and work is collated in a single place, keeping track of changes, users and iterations is much easier, also simplifying the auditing process.
The business environment has changed, and your financial systems should be agile enough to change as well. You can’t move into the future if your financial systems are living in the past. The time for modernisation is now, and with the cloud making this a much easier process, companies no longer need to worry about costly and lengthy projects. In fact, the cloud makes it simple for a business to ease into the benefits of an EPM solution, allowing it to start small – with planning and budgeting, for example – and then adding components as and when the timing works. Needless to say, this is far more cost-effective as well.
Talk to us for a free demo to see how you could build agility into your business.