In the world of business, Microsoft Excel has been a deeply ingrained part of our day-to-day tasks and work. It is especially prevalent in financial planning and accounting. But alongside changes to business demands and the way people work, Excel’s limitations have been exceedingly obvious, driving teams to explore new methods that could fill the gap in their corporate processes.
This article aims to look at common user problems with Excel and why it may be time for you to explore a more capable budgeting and forecasting software that has all the capabilities you’ll ever need.
Spreadsheets Are Limiting Your Team’s Visibility
While Excel may be the go-to for most businesses because of how cheap and easy it is to use, Excel is predominantly two-dimensional, which means teams looking to be more transparent with their data will find it difficult to do this using traditional spreadsheets. Any growing business that hopes to build financial models and do scenario-based planning will find data gathering using Excel to be time-consuming and challenging to work with. It’s challenging for companies to see a vision of what these scenarios will look like if the process itself is laden with errors.
If you find that driving transparency and trust is what your business needs, you need to opt for a more advanced FP&A software that is multi-dimensional and is equipped with features that promote greater transparency in your team’s budgeting, forecasting, and reporting.
You Struggle with Inaccuracies
Manual data entry in Excel, especially when creating budgets, makes it extremely prone to error and inaccuracies. One single mistake can throw off budgets and reports, which impacts the entire company. In particular, big organizations with vast amounts of data at their fingertips will find that using spreadsheets alone to house all their data for budgeting, forecasting, or reporting is just not feasible. At this point, it is best to explore new technology or to accommodate your financial data with an advanced cloud budgeting and forecasting software that stores data in the cloud, ensures accuracy in your numbers. Not only does this reduces human error, but it also ensures your data is safeguarded in the cloud.
Your Current Process is Tedious and You are Less-Productive
Because Excel is two-dimensional, this makes it disorganized and difficult to work through when you’re having to deal with large volumes of data. Finance teams may lose precious work hours just sorting through data, finding numbers and figures, tracking user changes, and updating reports with the latest sheets.
Luckily, we see more new tech that fast-tracks how we complete day-to-day tasks. Today’s latest FP&A software supports automation, which makes it easy to schedule workflows, so finance teams no longer have to prepare budgets and reports manually.
Streamlining how tasks are assigned and getting rid of redundant tasks that do not add value to your financial planning and reporting makes your team more productive and your process more efficient. Like PCF Cloud, new budgeting and planning software has revolutionized budgeting and planning and even integrated other financial tasks like forecasting and reporting, which has dramatically simplified many finance teams’ work.
Why PCF Cloud Is Better than Excel for Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting
With so many organizations growing at break-neck speed and having to face change constantly, having to deal with manual data entry and reporting can only lead to low productivity and wasted time in finance teams.
Although Excel can be sufficient for smaller organizations, growing organizations can benefit more from an advanced FP&A software that does everything Excel does but with more integrated capabilities that support automated workflows for their corporate financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting.
PCF Cloud is a complete FP&A solution in the cloud that empowers users with better control over their data and reporting. It comes with an integrated financial dashboard where users can see critical figures. It is a solution that allows for unlimited what-if modeling, driver-based budgeting, activity-based costing, and advanced reporting.
PCF Cloud also has robust integration capabilities, which makes it easy to integrate with your on-premise or cloud ERP system. Above all, PCF cloud is relatively easy to set up and does not require a significant investment to get up and running.
Explore other features that PCF cloud offers for your business. Alternatively, you can sign up for a free demo today and see how it works.
