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Maximise Your Business’ Financial and ROI with Automated Planning and Reporting

financial, automation, automated

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We admit the power of spreadsheets, the user-friendly tool that has been part of our lives for many years. From writing a personal monthly budget to creating a monthly planner for your kids, the spreadsheet has it all. The usefulness of spreadsheets doesn’t stop there, as a number of organisations are still using spreadsheets for their financial and planning analysis (FP&A). 

Although clothes with benefits like user-friendliness and accessibility, they are also commonly known to be error-prone, vulnerable to corruption and don’t support one crucial element in any organisation: collaboration across departments. Each department had to do FP&A using a separate spreadsheet instead of having everything on one platform. These reasons may cause significant risks to the organisation’s financial and operational health. 

The Call for Digitalisation 

Take a look around. Digital transformation is becoming “trendy” to many organisations as they seek to digitalise their operational and financial systems. Running a business in today’s digital era, doing FP&A using spreadsheets alone doesn’t help your organisation be at the forefront. 

For a start, when dealing with decision-making, you need the most recent and updated set of data rather than outdated ones that could jeopardise your whole organisation. The spreadsheet, unfortunately, doesn’t support real-time updates.

Real-time updates mean the system will automatically update any new data in real-time without waiting for your team to generate it manually. Every fresh data that might affect your decision-making comes in a split second; this also ensures you have real-time insights, which using a spreadsheet alone is like a barrier to this. 

Spreadsheet is a real deal, but pairing it with an automated planning software gives you increased benefits. It’s like cheese and wine: drinking the wine itself gives you a satisfying taste, but pairing it with cheese is even better. 

Numerous organisations are looking to make a move to utilise automated planning and reporting tools to achieve time and cost savings, reduce the risk of errors and proactively manage resources through scenario modelling. These are 4 key benefits that your organisation will gain upon making the move to employ modern planning solutions. 

4 Benefits For Your Organisation

Reduced Planning Cycle Time and Minimise Resource Costs

What makes a workplace more efficient? One of them is a collaborative environment. If every team does its work in siloed mode, things are done way slower than if they are allowed to collaborate whenever necessary. 

That’s what modern planning solutions aim to do. To provide a platform where you can practise collaboration between teams and across organisations. By having a feature called automation, you can automate planning and reporting, which can significantly reduce planning cycle times and optimise resource costs. Why?

Automated planning and reporting empower teams with rolling forecasts and higher-frequency planning by consolidating figures across multiple contributors in real-time and managing team collaboration with workflows. 

The FP&A process can be streamlined, reducing what usually takes weeks to days and sometimes hours. Like a considerate boss, automation is that person. It carries the ability to make your team’s work more accessible and smoother by significantly reducing month-end cycles. How? Automated planning and reporting help you by:

  • Generate detailed and precise reports in a single platform instantly while comparing actuals against the original plan. 
  • Most of the system is cloud-based, so your team can access it anytime, anywhere, without compromising the deadline. 
  • Let your team spend more time doing the analysis so you can make better decisions for your organisation. 

Enhanced Employees’ Productivity and Satisfaction

Some things need 100% manual effort, and some things aren’t. Some tedious tasks can be done faster than how it was done, like generating financial reports. Manually consolidating data and generating financial reports and plans at the end of each month is not an easy process. The whole process is time-consuming and sometimes can take half your week doing only one to two reports.

Imagine a big enterprise where such tasks require even more effort and time. The slow process does impact your organisation’s overall productivity, plus at the end of the week, your team might lose the motivation to continue doing so. The aftermath is slow decision-making. 

Tedious and time-consuming tasks affect your teams’ productivity and engagement more than you know. Hence, organisations that utilise automated processes are proven to acquire higher productivity rates and even employee retention rates compared to companies that rely on manual processes. 

In a nutshell, automating your FP&A process can reduce 45% of repetitive work, giving your team the opportunity to spend more time on higher-value tasks such as innovative thinking for problem-solving, finding business solutions and developing new ideas. 

Upgrade The Visibility Into Your Business Performance

As an optimistic business leader, you want your business to grow. Growth is a major milestone for any organisation. Expanding your business to a new area, hiring more talents or increasing revenue – all these make a champion. 

Thus, completely relying on spreadsheets is not an ideal move as spreadsheet-based reports and planning are known to not be scalable with limited templates that can’t instantly change as the business changes. 

Once your organisation experiences a major breakthrough, your team needs to generate more reports or redo every spreadsheet made since the data is no longer relevant to your business’s current status. This can act as a barrier to growth and be disempowering for your team. 

Every business needs 360-degree visibility into its performance. Otherwise, how do you make decisions without an accurate set of data? How do you want to measure what went right or what went wrong? 

Diverse elements make a scalable and agile business possible, but one underlying reason is instant, detailed, and accurate insights into your data and business performance. You can see the overall status of your business, and from there, you can gather what should be kept or changed. You can easily define and track metrics and monetise the value of the information at your fingertips.

The role of automation is not just about automating the process. You can see how automation affects every possible corner of your business. Automated reports and planning are like opening a door to Babylon Gardens, showing its beauty. You can gain real-time insights in a quicker manner and have access to performance across all departments. This can be viewed in one platform where data is updated every second. 

By looking at the data, you can accelerate forecasting with the ability to undertake quick and easy scenario modelling. This underpins more informed decision-making and can reveal opportunities for the organisation to gain an advantage over its competitors.

Next-level FP&A Teams

A dynamic and proactive finance team is the heartbeat of any responsive organisation, equipping it to thrive in any market climate. Imagine the power of automated financial tools that transform the way we work—turning days or even weeks of data gathering and report generation into a matter of minutes, even when dealing with data from years past!

This shift not only accelerates processes but also empowers the finance team to tap into a reliable and centralised source of truth. Now, with a secure online platform accessible anytime, decision-making becomes swift and informed, driving the entire organisation forward with confidence.

Having instant access to precise and thorough data empowers the finance team to deliver actionable insights that truly set the organisation apart from the competition. Plus, with data security, compliance, and governance seamlessly integrated into the solution, the finance team can focus their energy and resources on exploring and seizing new opportunities. 

Final Words 

Organisations that embrace automation unlock a treasure trove of time, cost, and resource savings, allowing them to redirect those assets toward strategic initiatives that bolster long-term agility. 

This advantageous shift can propel them far ahead of competitors who are still mired in outdated manual processes. In the post-pandemic landscape, survival hinges on adaptation, and the strongest players will rely on cutting-edge automated planning and reporting tools to thrive. The future favours the agile—are you ready to take the leap?

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