Many companies are now turning to cloud financial planning and analysis solutions for its ability to deliver integrated capabilities and better value to the business.
With organizations navigating a more complex economic landscape, FP&A software is crucial to guiding CFOs to make important decisions, minimize risk, and help them be more ready to face the future.
If you’re worried about what features will best fit your company´s needs, this article will help you consider what makes the ideal financial planning and analysis software.
Minimizes Error with Automation Capabilities and Multi-layered Security
The premise behind FP&A solutions is making budgeting, planning, and reporting as seamless as possible with minimal human error. Budgets are crucial to business functions, and any human error, no matter how minimal, can alter the budgeting process in more ways than one. Overlooking typos and wrong formulas, for example, can quickly destroy budgets and business strategies.
The right FP&A software like Performance Canvas Financials (PCF) is equipped with automated reminders and processes to improve financial operations and tasks’ efficiency, no matter how complex.
PCF´s core architecture is financial process automation, which significantly reduces time spent on budgeting and reduces errors made when doing manual budgeting.
With PCF, CFOs are given more flexible controls when it comes to what users can view and make changes. It has multiple user authorization and security levels, with simplified and controlled data entry through preset business rules.
Managers will appreciate an FP&A software that promotes better accountability for their teams with role-based access controls, ensuring finance teams have the right transparency they need to take full ownership of budgets and reports.
Multi-layered security is also essential to restrict access to sensitive information through preset rules that can be filtered according to team roles.
More importantly, financial planning and analysis tools need to have a self-check mechanism to safeguard data entry and protect critical financial processes.
Simplicity and Robust Integration Capabilities
Adopting cloud FP&A software can seem daunting for some, so simplicity and ease of use are crucial. Luckily, most FP&A software has this distinction. For example, Cloud PCF is easy to use, making it relatively easy for non-techy users to adopt.
It has an accessible dashboard that makes financial consolidation, reporting, and analysis a breeze. It includes a convenient drag-and-drop work environment so users can easily create financial reports from scratch. Quick templates and robust reporting capabilities like drill throughs, what-if analysis, and test assumptions also make it easy to build models and reports.
FP&A software needs to have easy integration capabilities with either on-premise ERP systems or cloud ERP systems so that users are guaranteed smooth flow of information across systems.
More importantly, an FP&A software must also allow manual or automated excel imports. Having this feature available will make it convenient to import initial budgets from Excel or other external file sources. At the same time, budgets and other reports can also be uploaded back to
ERP system or exported on the web.
Scalable Planning and Budgeting
Organizations must be able to tailor their FP&A software according to the changing needs of their business. However, few financial solutions have this flexibility.
Performance Canvas stands out because of its unlimited upgrade possibility. PCF allows its users to start with the most basic needs of their business. As they grow more comfortable with the system, they can upgrade to add new modules such as sales module, AR/AP module, profitability analysis module, or enhanced consolidation module.
PCF: A Complete Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting Solution
Today’s organizations need to have an easy-to-adopt solution that makes it easy to roll out to team members with as little training as possible.
Performance Canvas Financials promotes easy software championship for business users with no technical know-how. It has robust integration capabilities that allow automated data imports and extracts to on-premise or cloud ERP solutions.
With high-quality planning and self-service budgeting features, PCF is an ideal candidate for organizations looking for financial planning and analysis software with all the essential features discussed above in one straightforward solution.
Curious to know more about PCF’s robust features? Email us today or give us a call!