Jan Morath and Håkan Ebersjö, CEO & VP of Sales for Performance Canvas respectively, joined earlier this year a global customer conference in Nashville, Tennessee to introduce pcFinancials to the thousands of accountants, finance managers, and CFOs in attendance.
During the conference, both Jan and Håkan held several conversations with key decision makers in many medium to large sized companies in an attempt to find out more about the wants and needs of these decision makers. This is an exercise they do annually with different people to continue to understand and get inspiration on how to best develop the product in a way that makes most sense to its users.
One of the topics of interest for many of these finance personnel they have spoken to was important financial planning trends.
Having worked more than 15 years in the finance industry, both Jan and Håkan pointed out that through the years financial reporting and analysis, planning or budgeting, and analytics have always been done using large excel spreadsheets. Microsoft Excel has become the defacto tool for many finance departments – for good and bad.
That being said, the last 5 years saw significant changes in the way people viewed, executed, and used financial planning and analysis outputs. Financial planning trends continue to change dramatically as finance departments´ role in the organization continues to expand.
This is precisely why the problems of inefficient collaboration, lack of transparency and accountability, decreased productivity, and lack of good insights are being tackled head on by many CPM solutions like Performance Canvas.
These aforementioned problems brought about by the use of excel for financial planning and analysis hinder finance departments from being able to see the bigger picture and from being ahead of their competitors at a time of so much volatility and economic uncertainty. It has never been more important to plan effectively and forecast accurately.
If you are interested to know what the top 7 Financial Planning and Analysis Trends are today, below is a list of the 7 most important financial planning trends of 2017 you should know about.
1. Integration of Strategic and Operational Plans
2. Predictive Planning
3. Mobile Planning
4. Value driver-based planning
5. Self-service planning in different business units
6. Integration of sub budgets in Financial Planning
7. Planning in the Cloud
From this list, it is quite obvious that many finance departments certainly want to move past their challenges in financial planning in order to produce more value added outputs.
Integration of Strategic and operational plans along with predictive planning and value driver-based planning expose the desire of many finance departments to continue to mature in their planning and analysis.
In 2016, we saw an increase in people moving to the cloud. This year and in the next 5 years, we will continue to see significant investments in moving financial planning and analysis to the cloud as more and more vendors invest in improving cloud capabilities.
Needless to say, CPM vendors want to be up to speed with the latest important financial planning trends so they can provide more advanced functionalities in answer to the wants and needs of the customers.
To know more about how Performance Canvas developed its functionalities to address these latest financial planning trends, visit www.performancecanvas.com or email [email protected] to see the product in action.
To see this solution in action, visit www.performancecanvas.com or email [email protected] to schedule a free online demo for you and your finance team.
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.
