From Excel chaos to control with a Financial Planning Tool

Many companies still struggle with outdated processes and systems for Financial Planning – processes and systems that are not only unnecessarily time-consuming, but also prevent your FP&A team from creating the greatest possible value for the company.

Therefore, this article focuses on how a system in the form of the right Financial Planning Tool can help your company reach your budgets and forecasts safely.

Most companies use considerable resources on Financial Planning. But despite good intentions and hard work, many encounter challenges in the planning process that risk both compromising quality and stealing time from value-creating analyses.

But before you become completely despondent – chin up! Although a system can never stand alone, our experience is that the right Financial Planning Tool can form a stable foundation for the planning process. At the same time, it gives you the opportunity to use financial planning for active financial risk management in your company – which has great value in an unpredictable and changeable world.

Therefore, we would like to present you with four advantages of replacing those cumbersome budget spreadsheets with a Financial Planning Tool – a system that provides targeted support for the financial planning process from start to finish.

Cumbersome and manual processes often end up creating bottlenecks, just as they risk making budgets and forecasts outdated before they are even put to use.

And whilst Excel has been the backbone of financial reporting for decades, modern financial planning places increasingly greater demands on speed, accuracy and dynamic collaboration across the company. Demands that Excel is not designed to handle.

This leads to Excel-based planning often creating more confusion than clarity, particularly when the organisation grows and complexity increases.

Imagine your CEO asks for an updated forecast, and suddenly five different departments are sitting collecting data from 15 different files. Who has the right version? Which figures are updated? And how do you ensure that everyone is working with the same data foundation?

A Financial Planning Tool makes it possible to automate and streamline the entire process from data collection to reporting with supporting functions such as:

Low code/no code approach, which means that the finance team can take ownership of the Financial Planning Tool themselves without being dependent on IT resources. You can adapt your financial planning yourselves and implement changes directly in the system when the need arises.

Real-time data, where input is updated across the entire model for all users. Live dashboards and dynamic reports mean that management always has access to updated figures. Instead of waiting for weekly or monthly reports, decision-makers can follow developments continuously and react quickly to changes.

Built-in rights management gives you control over who can view and edit specific data – both at user and group level. This reduces the risk of a user accidentally entering something in the wrong place. Furthermore, it ensures high data protection by, amongst other things, minimising the risk of sensitive budget figures such as salary data ending up in the wrong places.

Data integration ensures that systems can connect to relevant data sources and guarantees that all employees work with the same, updated figures.

Built-in audit trail provides full traceability of changes at the lowest level, so you can see at any time where data comes from and who has made changes.

Scalability in the system design makes it possible to adapt data structures and models according to the company's needs. New departments, products or geographical areas can easily be added without having to make changes to the setup of models and reports, which gives the organisation the opportunity to grow with the tool.

Streamlined processes automate workflows and ensure that everyone knows what needs to be done when. Automatic reminders and real-time status keep the process moving and give management full overview of progress in the budget process.  

An effective Financial Planning Tool gives you the flexibility that is necessary to react quickly to external changes in market conditions.

With a Financial Planning Tool, you can quickly create or copy scenarios and forecasts, update data and adjust drivers – without the danger of overwriting versions or creating extra work in the organisation. This gives freedom to experiment with what-if scenarios and sensitivity analyses, so the organisation can better navigate the consequences of company-specific and global uncertainties and identify new business opportunities.

Scenario planning makes it possible for finance to play a more proactive role – for example, by quickly being able to test the effect of a new customer segment or a change in the production mix. Instead of merely reporting historical figures, finance becomes an active partner in setting direction and making decisions.

And if your company combines scenario planning with Predictive Forecasting, both the flexibility and quality of the planning work are strengthened, as well as the speed with which your organisation can deliver financial forecasts and analyses.

A Financial Planning Tool can also play a central role in creating closer connection between finance and the rest of the organisation.

For employees outside finance, the financial processes and analyses can often seem distant and complex. But one of a Financial Planning Tool's core functions is to translate operational information, such as HR's hiring plans and purchasing expectations from production, into financial data.

At the same time, user-friendly interfaces make it possible to provide input without being an Excel specialist and give individual users access to tailored dashboards with essential data. This makes it both relevant and motivating for the business to contribute to the overall planning process and helps to enhance the quality of input and speed of financial planning.

And Integrated Planning ensures that decision-makers across departments work from the same data foundation, so it becomes significantly easier to analyse, conduct qualified dialogues and make informed decisions.

This means that stakeholders outside finance can gain insight into the financial impact on the business, which creates a clear connection between the business' input and the economic consequence from a financial perspective.

Finally, a transition to a Financial Planning Tool is not just a technological shift – it is also a good opportunity to zoom out and reconsider your company's approach to budget and forecast. Are your processes functioning optimally? Are the right stakeholders engaged? And are you using too many resources on unnecessary detail rather than value-creating analyses?

Because the right tool creates the technological foundation that makes it possible for the other elements to function optimally – but success depends on all components working together as a coherent whole.