Behind us are the times of looking at “what happened” to our financials each month; with today’s technology and increasing data availability, organizations are now asked to provide a predictive view. If an organization doesn’t know what is going to happen in the future, they’re already behind competitors. The data-centric society we live in offers great insight and uses data to show improvement opportunities, but it also places more scrutiny on providing accurate and detailed financial analytics if businesses want to succeed.
Over the last decade, data has become a strength and a weakness for many organizations. This may sound confusing, but let’s break it down: today, a company can look at a plethora of data from different areas of the business, but increased data leads to complications in maintaining clean data and ensuring alignment across the organization. Organizations with data in different places, such as their CRM, ERP, HRIS, and offline spreadsheets, can often find themselves in a sea of data that becomes difficult to verify. These data discrepancies can lead to confusion among leaders, incorrect solution approaches, a decline in employee satisfaction, and a loss of customer trust. To combat this, it’s imperative to get in front of your problems with data, develop a Single Source of Truth, and build trustworthy analytics. By utilizing a single source of truth and enabling connected planning, Planwhiz can change the way your finance team operates.
What is the “Source of Truth”
Due to a number of factors, many organizations have important data in multiple places that needs to be brought together to conduct analysis and make business decisions. It’s possible that your organization stores data in multiple systems or files and struggles to maintain it in a clear, concise way. Combine that with the lack of version control or proper access maintenance in Excel and Google Sheets, and offline methods often bring a plethora of challenges. No matter what your data landscape is now, your top priority should be building a Single Source of Truth. The idea of a SSOT is one that combines all important financial information in one place, so finance teams don’t have to reconcile different numbers between systems or look in multiple places for the information they need to make business decisions.
With a single source of truth, your finance organization can focus on strategic business advisement instead of number crunching and report running. Not only will they be able to report monthly financials at month-end in a concise and clean way, but a single source of truth is key in predictive modeling and future forecasting. Without accurate data that everyone trusts, financial predictions are worthless.
Planwhiz Can Revolutionize Finance
Planwhiz doesn’t just combine all your data into one place, it also supports connected planning and gives real-time financial insights, so your business health is always at your fingertips. Our system can connect your team in finance to your sales team and marketing team, ensuring your organization is on the same page and working towards the same goals. Without a system that makes sense of all the data, business leaders are making decisions without the full picture, and employees are feeling lost in a sea of numbers.
Beyond providing a single source of truth and budgeting analytics, with Planwhiz you can set up customizable dashboards depending on the metrics that are most important to your business. These dashboards can then update and refresh automatically as new data is fed through your systems. Not only will leadership appreciate the seamless data interface and insightful analytics, but your team members will love getting to spend time analyzing data and making decisions instead of trying to clean and combine data.
Organizational Benefits
By investing in the data landscape of your organization, you’ll see benefits in your top line. Data integrity is critical for making the right business decisions, increasing sales by allocating the proper resources, and building out a long-term strategy. Here is how Planwhiz helps cultivate a prosperous landscape for your finance organization:
• Forecast Analysis
If you’re looking to make your forecasting process a breeze, and have month-end analytics time reduced exponentially, Planwhize is the tool for you. Planwhiz provides detailed actual vs. budget analysis as well as budget vs. forecast analysis. This built-in feature can help highlight any issues in the forecasting process or point out business trends.
• Dashboards & Insights
Trend analysis and understanding the bigger data picture can be done with the click of a button in Planwhiz. Automated dashboards show real-time analytics for your top metrics, including ARR waterfall, cash runway, and expense by function etc.
• Version Control
With the version control feature in Planwhiz, there will never be confusion on what the final number is. The finance leaders and department owners will always be aligned on targets, budgets, and actuals. Many organizations struggle to maintain alignment across the board using Excel but Planwhiz makes it a breeze!
• Spreadsheet Integration
With digital transformation projects in finance, or simply bringing financial processes to this century, we can’t lose sight of the reality of some of these landscapes. It’s not uncommon for finance organizations to use offline spreadsheets for analysis or tracking, so Planwhiz is built to be able to incorporate all these files into the Single Source of Truth with the right leadership approval.
Personnel Benefits
While the financial benefits and time saved may be easier to quantify, employee happiness is one of the biggest shifts we see after successful Planwhiz implementations. With consistent data integrity and a single source of truth, analysts and finance teams can let go of hunting down data or trying to reconcile between multiple systems. Instead, their time can be spent doing value-add activities like providing insights, analyzing trends, or exploring data outliers that are showing up. Employees feel more fulfilled when they perceive their days as having value, and, more often than not, their biggest point of frustration is bad data. It’s difficult to be a successful finance professional without trustworthy data. The increase in happiness across the board will lead to more productive teams, optimized processes, and a successful organization.
Getting Started with Planwhiz
Throw out the disconnected systems, frustrating analytics, and poor forecasting capabilities for a tool that benefits your people and your business – Planwhiz. Our product will revolutionize how your finance organization operates. It all starts with building a single source of truth, and soon, the budgeting, forecasting, and planning components of your organization will be pristine. Organizations have seen major success in transitioning to a streamlined digital data landscape in other departments; now, it’s finance’s turn. To set up a demo or explore implementation options, reach out to our team today! We can’t wait to work with you to change your organization for the better.