Many businesses are looking for innovative solutions to planning as they brace themselves for the rollercoaster year of 2021. Visionary finance leaders are abandoning the business-as-usual annual budgeting and forecasting process with its traditional approach in favour of shorter-term, inclusive, and agile plans that include the use of modelling and predictive analytics.
Amid ongoing and unprecedented uncertainty, businesses need the right systems and technologies in place to navigate this disruption. Systems must be integrated and coordinated across the entire business network to deliver real-time operational and financial data.
Companies who have embraced best of breed Financial Planning and Analytics solutions like idu-Concept, with its powerful, online, intuitive interface have been empowered with real-time, reliable, and up-to-date information.
These technologies, many of which are now cloud-based also improve internal organisation wide communication and transparency. Departmental managers are empowered to take ownership of their numbers, breaking down the typical organisational silos and reducing the burden on the finance department. They can easily access, understand, share, and analyse critical financial information to manage revenue, expenses, and cash flow and optimise working capital all in real-time.
With access to real-time data CFO’s can reduce error-prone manual tasks, speed up closing times, tighten controls, increase data analysis, and facilitate more accurate and empowered decision-making.
This in turn frees up the CFO to take on a more strategic advisory role within the organisation, armed with advanced analytics and financial modelling capabilities based on up-to-date, real-time information from the coal face of the organisation. They are enabled to respond faster to changing market conditions, spotting opportunities, and hedging against volatility.
In the words of Charles Darwin “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” Armed with the correct tools, insights, and timely information most businesses can adapt, pivot, and even thrive as we head into the new year.