Planning And Budgeting
Traditional financial planning and control processes are a huge drain on both financial and business resources. The continuous cycle of producing Medium Term Plans, Budgets, revising Forecasts and Latest Estimates, is a constant challenge for all involved.
The Medium Term Plan (MTP) is usually a 2 or 3 year outlook based on high-level targets. Due to the strategic nature of the MTP, the results are often disconnected from day-to-day operational realities, and are not fully owned by the budget holders.
This usually manifests itself in a "performance shortfall". These performance gaps are closed during numerous budget iterations which are usually a painful and time-consuming process.
No sooner is the final Budget approved by the Board, when a number of significant business or economic drivers change, and a revised forecast is required.
The constant demand for the latest estimate of performance is critical to corporate survival and ongoing success... but the internal time and cost to maintain this forecast leads to a less than optimal situation.
If this sounds familiar, we can help.
QlikView takes low level transaction data from multiple sources to build budget and forecast analysis, creating new data when necessary. The benefits of this approach include:
- Detailed budgets are based on actual sales and gross margin performance eg. customer, product, sales person, channel, or segment level. This detail is normally constrained by the volume of data, Excel capabilities and time.
- This transactional data approach avoids the disjoin between high-level and more aggregated budgets and forecasts.
- Powerful sensitivity and "what if" analysis against actual transaction data delivers new insight.
- Profiling customer and product profitability within the budget enables rapid segmentation of profitable and non-profitable business operations.
- Rolling forecasts can be created mixing latest month-end "actuals" with a revised forecast for the full year, giving an early indication of trends without the need for manual reforecasting.
Contact us now to let QlikView take control of your financial planning.