The FP&A team has a lot on their plate. But far and away their most difficult challenge is budgeting and forecasting for the annual plan. Plan accurately and it’s smooth sailing across the enterprise. Build an incomplete plan and it can severely impact your ability to operate and compete.
Why is corporate budget planning important?
The financial planning and budgeting process is a critical part of your business strategy. If your business plan provides the “what” of your company’s goals, then your budget provides the “how” of implementation. From staffing up to enter a new market to buying new capital equipment so you can produce more products, the corporate budgeting process is where the future of your business truly starts.
However, for many businesses the budget management process is little more than an educated guess. Finance often struggles to capture the attention and participation needed from business managers to truly make an impact. The result is a plan that’s disconnected from business goals and a finance department ill-suited to advise on business priorities.
Improve your budget planning process
Static planning processes are spreadsheet-driven, time-intensive, and lock finance into a plan that can't be easily updated to reflect changes.
Issues include:
- A financial plan and budget that are unresponsive to the dynamic changes a business faces
- Wasted time and energy spent collecting data from multiple stakeholders
- Time spent entering data into disconnected spreadsheets instead of strategic analysis
- An error-prone process that leads to inaccurate plans
- Decision-making based on stale data, since it takes too long to get up-to-date, fresh models
An active planning process lets your team act as a trusted adviser to leadership by providing a broader, unbiased business perspective.
With an active planning process, you can:
- Keep all data in one place, and synchronised in the cloud
- Easily plan, re-plan, and test multiple business scenarios throughout the year
- Spend less time bogged down collecting, consolidating, and entering data from different departments
- Have all information needed to quickly, accurately, and effectively make better decisions
- Take advantage of time-sensitive business opportunities
How does Workday Adaptive Planning support an active planning process?
Our enterprise planning software lets you create an annual plan based on a real-time, comprehensive source of truth so your team can plan and adapt with confidence. Benefits include:
- Automated, accurate data collection that can improve productivity by more than 70%
- More time for your team to conduct analysis and provide strategic insights
- Improved collaboration between finance and the business stakeholders who execute budget planning
- Comprehensive, real-time data that increases confidence in the plan while allowing you to run flexible, what-if scenarios
- The ability to continuously conduct budget planning to take advantage of new information
Improve your budget planning process with Workday Adaptive Planning
There are four key steps to preparing an effective annual corporate budget plan. Workday Adaptive Planning for finance can help you get the most out of each one:
Step 1: Be realistic
Determine your goals, your opportunity, and what’s possible to accomplish. Workday Adaptive Planning gives you complete visibility into your past and current performance for an accurate indicator of what to expect for the future.
Step 2: Allocate your resources
With Workday Adaptive Planning you can quickly and easily test a number of different scenarios to understand how they will affect your overall strategy. Workforce, capital, revenue, expenses—all of these can be adjusted to determine the optimal budget to accomplish your business goals.
Step 3: Be ready to adapt
No plan survives the realities of the marketplace for long. By implementing a continuous budget planning process you can constantly tweak and reevaluate your plan based on actuals and the latest business and market information to give your business the best chance of success.
Step 4: Measure and optimise
Finally, use financial reporting to measure success and plan next steps. With the ability to create self-service reporting and dashboards, Workday Adaptive Planning for finance lets analysts, managers, and executives throughout the company analyse performance on a real-time basis, allowing leaders to make strategic decisions and shift resources without waiting until the end of the quarter to see what’s working (or not).
