Financial Planning

Basic financial planning is a critical business requirement, no matter what your company size. The definition of business performance management includes financial planning as a critical component.  Consider how you would navigate the rollout of your strategic plan without utilizing financial planning to manage the process. It would feel as though you are sailing a rudderless ship.  The business financial planning process is used to detail plan projects and resources required to achieve strategic plan objectives.

If you are ready to put your strategic plan into action, it is time you ask some important questions:

• What is your vision for financial planning?
• Are you satisfied with the status quo?
• Are you relying too heavily on Excel?
• Does your team spend excessive amounts of time doing any of the following:
• • Fixing broken spreadsheet links
  • Reconciling one spreadsheet to another
  • Manually keying in large quantities of data
  • Struggling to compare one scenario to the next
• What happens once the plan is complete?
• How difficult is it to track headcount changes?
• Have you identified the cause-and-effect relationships within your financial plan that would allow you to take advantage of driver-based planning?
• Are you able to transition seamlessly from budgeting to forecasting?

If you are not satisfied with the status quo, then you need to take action before the ship runs aground. At Resource Planning Solutions, we can build your vision for financial planning. We work closely with clients to review their planning needs, and then translate those needs into a set of business process requirements. For each client, these business process requirements are then used as a roadmap to guide our implementation process, ensuring that the result will exceed expectations.

Our financial planning solutions typically take one of the two following paths:

Path 1 - Use Microsoft Excel to either develop a new application or modify your existing Excel planning application.

Path 2 - Use Alight Planning, an integrated planning tool.

Alight Planning is an exceptional financial planning tool for medium-sized business that allows for multiple scenarios, workflow management, driver-based planning, reporting, and more.

Financial planning, along with financial reporting and analytics, is a core component of an effective financial performance management (FPM) solution. All three components need to function in unison to provide Management with the control, information and insight they need to achieve financial goals.

If you need financial planning help, call us today at 818.436.0781 to discuss how Resource Planning Solutions can help you improve your planning processes.  Also, please visit our Resource Center where you will find case studies, white papers and tools relating to financial performance management processes.