The financial process plays a crucial role in companies as budgeting, forecasting, and financial analysis assist major corporate decisions of the CFO, CEO, and the Board of Directors.
Hence, the FP&A department must optimize their FP&A process and be more focused on delivering value. Since an optimized FP&A process will result in a more trusted and objective view of the company’s performance that will help the executives make more sound business decisions.
CFOs and other finance professionals will know that their FP&A process is optimized when it:
- enables the FP&A teams to spend less time on manually creating reports and manually validating your data sources
- allows the FP&A teams to spend less time on checking the accuracy of data
- promotes collaboration among members of the FP&A team
- results in improved cash flow visibility
- cuts forecasting time
- provides for adequate storage of historical data and allow companies to see trends
- will enable the company to see how it is doing as compared to forecasts
- will assist the company make business strategies by providing relevant information
For companies who seek to optimize their FP&A process, the most efficient and effective way for them to achieve it is by employing financial planning and analysis software. It is worth mentioning that not all solutions are created equal. Some are better than others.
However, utilizing a financial planning and analysis software would tremendously help companies, especially those companies which are still having manual FP&A process. Moreover, using financial planning and analysis software is the faster and cheaper option for CFOs to optimize their FP&A process.
However, choosing the right financial planning and software for the company does not end a company’s journey to FP&A process optimization. It is only the start, as the implementation of the software is the other half of that journey. Furthermore, software implementation also plays a vital role in the optimization of the FP&A process. It is crucial that the financial planning and analysis software is easy to install across the company, will not require the users to train tediously and won’t take a long time to get used to the software’s interface. It is also equally important that the financial planning and analysis software has reliable support even after the software goes live, and provides consistent updates that will further improve the FP&A process.
Performance Canvas Financials is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis software that aims to assist companies in their journey to FP&A process optimization. It provides its users with access to reliable and real-time insights so they can make sound and strategic business decisions. Moreover, it provides its users with automatic updates to ensure that their users are always informed.
There are also several other financial planning and analysis software available in the market. Thus, in choosing the software, companies must be mindful of what tools the software can offer and the support that it provides.