Departmental Solutions for Budgeting, Forecasting and Planning

Our Budgeting, Forecasting and Planning application helps streamline your budgeting and forecasting process enabling you to complete the process more quickly, analyse and understand the plan in more depth and to be able to reforecast more regularly.

We can quickly develop a solution to meet your planning and forecasting needs. This solution will help cut the time to deliver the plan leaving you more time to:

• analyse it
• to test your assumptions
• compare against previous years
• ensure that the overall plan is coherent

What are the benefits?

• Improved accuracy and a robust solution that removes Excel completely from the budgeting process, so you can integrate detailed data easily.
• Regain control of the planning process using workflow to monitor Managers progress in completing their plans.
• Have fast estimates of the potential year-end position as actual results can be incorporated to provide monthly forecasts of performance.
• Involve Managers from all around the business in the planning cycle using the web-based interface.
• Only one version of the truth exists and whether you are an international or worldwide company you will be discussing the same figures. Once a model is built Managers cannot change it.
• Allows planning by different “dimensions” of the business. For example in:
  • Retail / Wholesale - by store, product category, week
  • Media - by publication, sector, week
  • Motors – branch, brand, department, week
• The results can be reviewed quickly in tables or graphs. Ad-hoc ratios can be calculated and performance reviewed without the need to re-convene the planning meeting.
• Reduce time dramatically to assemble quarterly re-forecasts.
• Simple, easy to use software that can produce balance sheets and cash flows using the same software. The balance sheet and cash flows are linked to the profit and loss and update automatically as the profit and loss changes.
• Flexible software that allows it to be used for other applications such as a time recording system, resource planning, promotion planning, etc.
• Allows driver based planning to plan based on headcount, square footage, units, etc.
• A comprehensive tool that can integrate fully with the Cognos Business Intelligence tools to develop a Performance Management system.

Use Planning to:

• Develop budget and forecast plans; Cognos tools are provided.
• Allow Managers across the business to contribute to the plan in a structured environment.
• Remove Excel from the budgeting process.
• Allow Finance to keep control and prevent Managers from changing the plan.