With Infor budgeting and planning, companies can effectively leverage technology to forecast and plan quickly, accurately and objectively as well as strengthen their performance. It also assists them to assess any potential impact of the main events across the company; simplify the creation as well as maintenance of the relevant, dynamic budgets and plans that improve overall results and support the organizational goals.
Infor Budgeting and Planning – Best Practices
What it does
This solution helps companies to greatly improve their overall performance by streamlining budgeting, planning and also forecasting business processes as well as reducing the time taken to fully create and execute the plans. This solution draws on all the information that is available across the organization and also around the world at that level of detail required.
This solution greatly assists organizations improve all the aspects of budgeting, planning as well as forecasting process, including;
1. Budgeting more effectively
Document the entire budgeting process, educate the system users across your organization, monitor the entire company’s budget approvals and submissions at any time form anywhere and enforce budget timelines and rules. The electronic budget approval and submission process, guided workflow capabilities, automated exception alerts and central communication portal are some tools that will assist you gain complete control over the process.
2. Planning more effectively
Model the business quickly and also test many scenarios easily, so that you are able to prepare realistic operational and financial plans that assists the organization achieve all its goals. The driver-based modeling assists the company define all its business success factors, the key contributors to these factors, and plan them in good detail providing a clear roadmap to improved performance.
3. Testing the ‘what if’’ scenarios
Model your business comprehensively and also perform the real time ‘what if’ scenario planning. With Infor planning and budgeting, you can effectively build in allocations, calculations, seasonality, market factors, phasing and more.
4. Ensuring very realistic results with forecasting
Let your calculation engine choose the best method for analyzing data and create good benchmarks to test likely accuracy of the forecasts submitted by the employees thus reducing the forecast game-playing. This objective forecast can also be used to jump-start the budgeting and planning process. Forecasting enables you to predict at a summary level as well as at a very detailed level, like region, product line or sales channel.
5. Adjusting actions so as to achieve goals
Shift your planning away from the less accurate historical forecasting and budgeting and move towards the continuous predictive rolling and modelling forecast models – adjusting your revenue targets automatically to meet the goals as one period closes and another new period begins.
What it means
CPM Budgeting, Planning and forecasting assists you:
- Improve the speed and quality of the planning process.
- Increase your budget’s relevance and speed of the budgeting process.
- Prepare your forecasts faster, with more accuracy and insight.
- Ensure improved performance and realistic results when forecasts, budgets and plans all work greatly with each other.
- Account for unusual or one-time events that can easily skew plans and results.
- Generate very effective plans without any statistical expertise.
The Infor CPM Budgeting and Planning difference:
This solution delivers unique value to all its customers by –
1. Accelerating the budgeting and planning process.
2. Delivering very sophisticated analytical tools which do not require statistical expertise.
3. Improving their ability to generate accurate forecasts and create complex models.
4. Leveraging the familiar spreadsheet tools so as to improve forecasting.
Planning
This solution assists companies improve on every aspect of budgeting, planning and forecasting process.
Benefit from experience – collaboration
Entrusting only a small group of individuals to come up with the plans for an organization is one of the planning methods. However, one of the best practices method is enabling many individuals from across an organization to effectively collaborate thus allowing the organization to greatly benefit from the wealth of experience and variety of perspectives from the many people involved in the planning process. This solution enables collaboration through the web-based access to data and plans in central data repository. In addition, this information can later be used for forecasting, analysis, reporting and budgeting.
Achieve financial goals – calculation
With this solution, you are able to work backwards from a financial goal to input numbers, ratios and percentages needed to achieve that goal. In addition, with this solution, you can easily see how the key performance drivers like customer profitability, volume, capacity, price, etc, impact on your financial objectives.
Budgeting
Whether your company does business globally or locally, this solution’s budgeting functionality assists you streamline, manage and also improve integrity of this important business process.
Manage the process – control
This solution offers various capabilities to assist you easily document the process of budgeting, educate all system users across your organization and enforce budget timelines and rules.
Streamline the tasks – speed
Using the application’s Excel interface or the web, the approved system users can retrieve and submit data easily at any time from anywhere. The system users can even directly load data from the data warehouses or source systems. Users then submit the figures of the budget directly to your solution’s central database, where all numbers are consolidated automatically thus eliminating need for error-prone, time-consuming processes of collecting and also re-keying data manually from very many contributors.
Improve the integrity – accuracy
This solution offers a number of in-built capabilities to assist ensure the accuracy of the organization-wide budget.
Some of the in-built capabilities include; translating multiple currencies, support for indicating if a number should be treated as non-financial or financial, viewing different currency rate versions (budgets, forecasts, and actuals), allocating budget portions to business departments or units and creating detailed asset and salary budgets. In addition, you can modify your budget when there is a change in business conditions, and rely on this solution to immediately and automatically duplicate changes throughout your system.
This solution’s highlights;
- Models using calculations, phasing, seasonality, market factors, allocations.
- Driver-based and top-down planning models
- Work backward from your financial goal
- Historical-based, zero-based, and rolling plans and budgets
- Budget status monitor
- Approval tracking and budget submission
- Budget version tracking
- Currency translations
- Detailed salary, employee and asset plans and budget
- Actuals to budget comparisons
- Model synchronization
Conclusion
Infor budgeting and planning assists you to set high level target plans quickly, develop well detailed driver-based financial and operational plans, collect and also manage the budget and to forecast the information needed to achieve the planned objectives.