For some companies that need to close their books in October, the busy days are coming. During these busy period, accountants usually sigh in frustration as they mumble ”there has to be a better way of doing this”.
For those that are still using the much vilified excel spreadsheets for their financial analysis, their exasperation is well grounded.
These accountants not only spend unimaginable number of hours trying to build business logic into excel and setting up business rules, they must also have to go back and forth trying to obtain data from everyone and then verify the accuracy of the data they will use for their reporting and financial analysis. In the middle of all these, excel spreadsheets might even break and then that´s another hurdle they have to manage.
So why is Excel no longer enough for finance?
A long time ago excel and financial analysis worked well. People were content and excel was enough.
However, today it is a different story. We have entered an era of fierce competition, volatile markets, political unpredictability, massive amounts of data, and lurking financial risks. Companies need to be better equipped to make sound business decisions.
Excel for finance just doesn´t perform very complex calculations in they way finance ought to use them today; it doesn´t foster collaboration; it gives versioning issues; and there are way too many budget iterations for Excel to manage. In short, excel can´t cope anymore if the company wants to be ambitious in its pursuits.
The Better Way
If you want Financial Planning & Analysis to improve, two things must happen: improve the entirety of the process and improve your supporting technology.
It is a mistake to assume that automating everything makes things better. It will only make it faster, not better. This is why it is important to do both – process improvement and technology upgrade.
Both these can be achieved in select technology providers like Performance Canvas Financials. Performance Canvas Financials is a new SaaS FP&A software that delivers best practices in financial planning & analysis through prepackaged finance logic. These include driver-based budgeting, live forecasting, what-if analysis, activity-based costing, allocations, multiple assumptions, dashboarding and many more.
This software starts out by suggesting how FP&A should be performed in order to increase efficiency. It then takes your business type and model into consideration so that the software makes sense in your day to day operations so in essence, you can model your business into this SaaS FP&A software.
Are you having trouble understanding where your bottlenecks are coming from? Performance Canvas Financials has a workflow that guides you and shows you what and who is slowing the process down.
Do you want standardization of rules in the organization? Performance Canvas Financials sets up business rules that are applicable to the entire organization with certain well thought through exceptions as the business requires.
Do you have problems with accuracy of figures or formula? Performance Canvas Financials has self-check mechanisms to ensure the highest degree of accuracy in all of your sheets.
Do you want the familiarity of Excel for your finance team? Performance Canvas Financials uses Excel on its front end to make adoption of this tool fast and easy.
Do you want to see the impact of your decisions on your cash flow? Performance Canvas allows you to do that and it will even show it in a good dashboard so that it is easier for you to understand and comprehend.
Whatever problems you are currently going through, Performance Canvas Financials have thought of the perfect solution for you.
To learn more about this new and promising SaaS software, visit www.performancecanvas.com or request a free online demo by emailing info@dspanel.com.
DSPanel offers cutting edge technology platform for business analytics, planning, and visualization. DSPanel designs, builds, and operates with the end users in mind. Performance Canvas was created by DSPanel to answer the unarticulated needs of the market not addressed by previous available solutions. With Performance Canvas, information is transformed into valuable business insights for the business executives to utilize in their decision-making process. DSPanel currently has over 2500 organizations deploying their solutions.
