May 5, 2023
The significance of the role of FP&A in a corporation's growth cannot be overstated. Forecasting, budgeting, and management reporting are all essential functions facilitating data-driven business decisions that are dependent on timely and accurate information. FP&A departments are finding themselves moving or manipulating the same data over and over again, month after month. Legacy on-prem systems and inefficient Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheets are not cutting it and are leading to executives spending a large amount of their time on sourcing, storing, and formatting data instead of on much-needed financial analysis and strategic planning. The increasing frequency and magnitude of economic volatility in the form of supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, etc. are further adding pressure on the traditional financial planning processes and emphasizing on the need to adopt predictability in their planning.
With the advancement in technology; finance teams can be equipped to factor real-time data into their financial plans and drive strategic decision-making when it really matters – in the moment.
According to TCS’ report on The Next Era of FP&A, 43% of planning, business and forecasting activities are informed by intuition rather than by data and analytics. Even though the typical finance organization spends about 10% more time and resources on FP&A activities than it did a decade ago, today’s FP&A teams still find themselves a step behind. One of the biggest problems that CFOs and finance teams are facing is poor quality data and the inability to use available data to produce useful insights.
Teams are spending far too much time focusing on the smaller details that add little value to the business rather than looking at the bigger picture. According to a PWC Benchmark Study, typically, nearly twice as much time is spent on gathering data as on analysis. Finance teams are spending the majority of their time sorting and organizing data rather than analyzing it to generate meaningful insights.
Sancode technologies can help organizations transform their financial planning digitally by automating key processes, such as data collection and validation, to maximize team effectiveness.
By incorporating NLP and AI engines, Finance Teams can pull data from existing tools and systems and also from external databases (including ERPs, excel sheets, various website, data warehouses, business intelligence tools, etc.) to provide real-time, cognitive, prescriptive and predictive insights with limited to zero manual effort throughout the year.
With the help of AI and ML-based algorithms, organizations can then perform in-depth, what-if scenario analysis to test alternative assumptions for future performance and see the impact of decisions before making them to improve actual results.
With increased transparency into FP&A processes, various stakeholders can be included and allowed to streamline planning and financial reporting, plus analyze thousands of data points in real time.