There’s no time like the present to invest in modern cloud technology. Don’t delay—the longer you wait, the more your company falls behind the times and remains entrenched with tools of the past.
Out-of-date processes can lead to errors that are costly in both time and money, that is, if the inaccuracies are even discovered in the first place. Instead of analyzing the data that provides valuable insight to decision-makers, members of the financial team are sucked into the long process of cleaning up an extremely preventable planning, budgeting, and forecasting mess. Time spent fixing spreadsheet mistakes and gathering data prevents the financial team from staying future-oriented.
So how do you know when it’s time for a sweet transformation of your Planning & Budgeting system? Here are some of the signs for which to look:
- Lack of cross-departmental collaboration
Leaving financial close and consolidation processes to financial employees only is a practice of the past. The most innovative companies are building their teams with members from various departments. By including data from all units, the business experiences a well-rounded financial depiction rather than one from a single viewpoint.
Oracle’s Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) allows department leaders across the business to participate in what once was finance-only responsibilities.
- Inability to plan, budget, and forecast across various dimensions
Sending and updating spreadsheets via email makes the data error-prone. Now imagine there are multiple currencies, locations, or even languages involved, and the probability of miscalculation and misinterpretation increases tremendously. To avoid a costly and inefficient blunder, consider switching to a cloud-based technology that prevents such mistakes from happening in the first place.
- The challenge of helping leaders across the business to understand financial processes has become too great
The easiest way to fall behind the competition is to not utilize all the sectors and employees that make up your organization’s team. A company’s finance department is a small section of the whole business, with most employees playing non-financial roles. Visual analytics play a vital role in assuring everyone understands the financial process. Oracle’s PBCS allows financial and non-financial employees alike to speak the same language and encourages more involvement in the practice.
- When you start to think, “there has to be an easier way to do this!”
If you are frustrated with your current processes and question how to simplify existing practices, it’s probably because you are doing more work than you should. Excel-based processes are time-consuming and require extra diligence to avoid errors detrimental to a company’s success. A planning, budgeting, and forecasting tool, such as PBCS, has been well-proven to streamline financial processes and keep data error-free.
- Your company’s finances have outgrown the current system and multiple people need access to financial information
Whether your business has grown slowly or rapidly, the company’s financial needs have certainly become more complex than they were in those early days. Has your company expanded into new markets, by number of employees, or through the creation or sale of new products? If so, it’s time to leave behind the labor-intensive Excel process and adopt a system that works hard so you don’t have to. The growth of a company requires employees to divide and conquer the vast amount of data in a limited time frame. Consolidating the work of many people into a spreadsheet is not only a tedious task but also one that can be full of inaccuracies that are difficult to trace back to a single source. Oracle’s PBCS can eliminate these errors and will continue to grow along with your company and its needs.
Please contact AdvancedEPM today at info@advancedepm.com for more information.
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