Without clearly defined organizational goals and strategic resource allocation - based on existing and forecast data - your organization runs the risk of wasting time, resources and revenue on dead-end initiatives that inevitably lead to financial failure. The solution? Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting solutions.
In its 2023 published ‘Global planning, budgeting and forecasting survey, Insights report’, Deloitte shares that understanding the purpose and alignment of the Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting processes is crucial to creating an effective Enterprise Performance Management(EPM) framework and fully unleashing the benefits of effective Planning, Budgeting &Forecasting solutions.
This article is a quick guide to understanding the difference between each stage of the Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting process, and how each stage will guide you closer to achieving enterprise wide financial success, starting off with financial planning.
The planning process involves creating a top-down strategic plan that maps out your organization’s financial objectives and establishes a framework that guides your organization towards achieving those strategic goals and objectives.
As Pablo Picasso famously once said, ‘Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.’ The same rings true for the importance of implementing a planning cycle to guide your organization to achieve efficient and sustainable growth.
The financial planning process involves:
Deloitte’s Insight report also delves into the importance of integrating Connected Planning into your organization’s technological landscape as it helps facilitate faster and more accurate forecasting capabilities and promotes a stronger collaborative culture, enabling cross-functional and cohesive financial planning. By investing in a Connected Planning solution like Anaplan Financial Planning and collaborating with an Anaplan Partner like Metora, you’ll be able to completely transform your entire organization’s financial performance with ease.
According to Investopedia, ‘A budget is an estimation of revenue and expenses over a specified future period of time and is utilised by governments, businesses, and individuals at any income level’. In the simplest terms, a budget is essentially a plan which details how an organization intends on spending and earning its money within a defined period of time.
According to IBM, the budgeting stage involves:
Your organization needs to create a detailed budget in order to track and measure your organization’s financial progress and conduct data-driven resource allocation to ensure your on the right financial path. Furthermore, by establishing financial controls including defining budgetary guidelines and implementing expenditure approval processes, your organization is more likely to adhere to the financial plan.
Forecasting essentially involves making predictions of future outcomes based on existing data and trends. The closer your predictions are to real world outcomes, the better.
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) shared a powerful insight into the role of forecasting stating that, ‘The primary goal of forecasting is to identify the full range of possibilities, not a limited set of illusory certainties. Whether a specific forecast actually turns out to be accurate is only part of the picture—even a broken clock is right twice a day. Above all, the forecaster’s task is to map uncertainty, for in a world where our actions in the present influence the future, uncertainty is opportunity.’
Therefore, forecast based decision making can only lead to positive organizational growth where the data relied upon in the forecasting process is not only accurate and up to date, but where it highlights uncertainties and, in turn, opportunities for change within organizations, industries, and the world at large.
Furthermore, Deloitte’s Insight report goes on to reveal that, ‘Organizations with high levels of participation across functions, also enjoy greater forecast accuracy with 77% keeping forecast revenue variances to less than 10%’, highlighting the importance of investing in connected systems to facilitate faster and more efficient enterprise-wide forecast cycles.
It further reveals that, ‘30% of organizations also report that they use spreadsheets as their main budgeting and forecasting tool and perhaps surprisingly this is unchanged from 2014.Barriers to technology implementation, as with many other planning challenges, are no different in large or small organizations.’
By investing in Connected Planning solutions like Anaplan solutions implemented by an Anaplan Partner like Metora your organization will be able to speed up your forecasting cycles. Rapid forecasting cycles are imperative to ensure that the forecast data analytics relied upon remains relevant, enabling your organizational leaders to make the right decision, at the right time.
Leverage Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting solutions to create a strategic financial plan, allocate resources based on the parameters of an intuitive budget and analyse forecast data that supports data-driven decision making, to help navigate your organization to powerful financial performance.
As a data science company offering Connected Planning technologies, our experienced data scientists will work with your finance teams to deliver software solutions that transform your Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting processes. Get in touch to start your data analytics powered planning journey.