hi I'm Jared Hillam Wall Street is
worried about one thing and one thing
only and that's the future no matter how
amazing your organization is performed
in the past they want to know that
you're going to knock their socks off
three months from now this has a
profound impact on organizations as it
requires them to plan in detail about
how much business they will generate and
what costs they will incur a majority of
this burden falls on the shoulders of
the CFO but CFO's don't generally make
these predictions alone to get this
information CFO's will assign line of
business managers to provide these
forecasts for their business lines then
the CFO team will roll up the results to
provide a company-wide perspective that
sounds pretty simple right well it's not
in fact in most cases it's an absolute
mess the process usually starts with the
office of the CFO creating a template in
Excel this template then gets sent out
to all the line and business managers
asking them to input their forecast for
next quarter or next year after a line
of business manager fills out the Excel
spreadsheet they'll email it back to the
office of the CFO so they can be
consolidated to provide a corporate
forecast
if the CFO's team we're dealing with
only one or two line of business
managers this process would be pretty
easy but in most organizations they're
dealing with dozens of people that are
creating and evaluating forecasts so the
minute that the finance team thinks that
their forecasts are complete they will
get yet another revision or an update
that must get incorporated into the
final tally on top of that finance has
to track the most up-to-date version of
the spreadsheets out of hundreds of
revised copies sitting in their email
boxes after this painful process is
wrapped up and the forecasts are
released the circus starts all over
again in preparation for the next
forecast so as you can see budgeting and
planning is an Excel nightmare and this
is where budgeting
tools step into the picture the
challenge of budgeting and planning from
a business intelligence perspective is
that it requires two kinds of activities
read and write in order for line of
business managers to predict the future
they will need to see their past
performance this will help them answer
questions like whether trending is
steadily increasing and if there are
certain months which have spikes or
valleys this also allows managers to see
how their expenditures are panning out
all these activities are read activities
which is functionality that every
business intelligence tool provides
however when it comes to writing back
our estimates we quickly hit a wall and
a number of business intelligence
platforms that provide this
functionality drops dramatically which
is why so many organizations refer to
manually passing round excel files and
hand telling their estimates budgeting
and planning tools solve this challenge
by deploying their data into OLAP cubes
for more about OLAP I recommend you see
our video called what is OLAP in OLAP we
get the ability to explicitly model how
we want the data to roll-up so it
provides a great place to not only see
historical data but it also allows us to
input our future plans because the
future plans are input directly into a
model that has a predefined roll-up the
results are automatically consolidated
for the office of the CFO this means
that we avoid the Excel mess of trying
to hand consolidate each Excel
spreadsheet sent via email additionally
this gives the line of business managers
a vision of their rolled up estimates
while I focus this video on the office
of CFO by no means is that the only
group that needs to plan and forecast
sales supply-chain
HR and many other teams need these
capabilities anytime you are working as
a team and rolling up regular forecasts
budgeting and planning tools should be
considered as an alternative to
exchanging Excel spreadsheets the good
news is is that most budgeting and
planning tools use Excel as their canvas
so the transition from an expertise
perspective is minimal
any organization seeking to use these
kinds of tools should incorporate a few
important considerations number one your
OLAP cube ideally should be an in-memory
structure so that your users can see the
immediate roll-up of the numbers they
put into their forecasts number two both
your historical data and your future
forecasts should seamlessly transfer to
a web interface so that larger audiences
can be informed and participate in
planning activities number three your
planning tools should allow you to
distribute estimates at any level in the
cube this means not only should you be
able to forecast the whole year all at
once and have those numbers distributed
to each month but you should also be
able to plan one month and have it roll
up to the year number for your planning
tool should natively allow you to work
from Excel to conduct the planning
process and number five your planning
tool should be able to scale to large
quantities of people and data hitting
dead ends because of performance issues
is not something you want to deal with
after all the manpower has been put into
getting the planning process correct
intricity is uniquely able to guide its
customers through these and other
important considerations when diving
into the budgeting and planning process
I recommend that you reach out to
intricity and talk with one of our
specialists we can help you organize
your Excel mass and provide a path that
will deliver timely and accurate
historical performance as well as future
planning