What Business Leaders are Doing Now Versus What They Need to be Doing

Slow and Manual Financial Processes vs. Scenario Planning

The ability to explore the financial consequences of alternative business growth and funding strategies is critical, especially in fluid or volatile markets. But, this type of what-if-analysis isn’t possible within spreadsheet budgeting. Changing data at a detail data level and have it dynamically “ripple through” to the cash flow analysis, or quickly make a percentage adjustment on a group of data to drive a different cash flow scenario becomes a large and often imprecise task.

High-Growth Mode vs. Capital Efficiency

All businesses need to plan for strategic change, such as office expansion or acquisitions, or to act on risks introduced by market dynamics. With Planning Maestro, our scenario planning software, the dynamic link between all key financial statements (profit & loss, balance sheet and cash flow), means all related reports can be created quickly and easily, so you – and your executive team – can immediately quantify your assumptions and understand how they will affect your financial statements.

Lack of Personnel Planning vs. Automated Workforce Planning

Today’s environment requires business leaders to plan for workforce expenses at a level of granularity that is difficult, if not impossible, with Excel. Personnel planning with Planning Maestro means you can control your expenses across different operational centers, shifts and products, adjust payroll numbers for high turnover departments such as call centers, and even budget at an individual employee level to see the cash flow implications of each employee’s taxes and benefits throughout the year.

Reporting on Actuals vs. Forecasting

Finance leaders know that budgets are never set in stone. The dynamic nature of business means a budget that looked great in January can require a major overhaul in April. It can cause havoc in an organization that does not have an efficient process for adjusting budgets and plans accordingly. Planning Maestro streamlines budget to actual variance analysis and eliminates the time consuming and error-prone manual work typically needed to reference and compare budgets and forecasts.

Top-Down Budgeting vs. Driver-Based Budgeting

With driver-based budgeting, it is easy to link corporate goals and financial metrics to operational activities. This allows your business to track performance and progress while offering the flexibility to course correct whenever necessary.

Empower Your Business with Planning Maestro

Making the Shift:
Cash Flow Forecasting Tips for Turbulent Times

Your Cash-Flow Forecasting Options

The challenge for most companies in developing accurate and timely cash flow plans, reports, and analysis is the limited availability of capable software for supporting this effort. The lack of viable software has ensured that spreadsheet technology remains the go-to method for developing cash flow models and statements and had led to inability to forecast at all.

Rating: C

Limitations: 

  • Inherent spreadsheet limitations do not effectively support planning or forecasting of cash flow
  • Difficult to develop and maintain versions, dynamic financial statement links, and what-if analysis

Rating: D+

Limitations: 

  • Most ERP systems do not support best-in-class planning and forecast modules
  • Inflexible cash flow functionality
  • Implementation and modeling efforts can be costly

Rating: B

Limitations: 

  • Business Performance Management (BPM) solutions can be very expensive, often more than $100,000, requires significant IT support and may take up to years to implement.
  • Difficult to find a solution that offers inherent dynamic links between financial statements

Rating: B+

Limitations: 

  • Cash flow point solutions will usually offer robust functionality for creating effective cash flow models but are not integrated planning & forecasting applications. As a result, there is a disconnect between the operational and high-level planning activities that companies need to prepare a realistic cash flow projection.
  • Insight and visibility into the underlying components of cash flow reporting is difficult to maintain

Rating: A+

Advantages: 

  • Support for purpose-built cash flow reporting and analysis planning capabilities
  • Minimal implementation costs with out-the-box cash flow statements
  • Support for automatic, dynamic links between key financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow)
  • Support for cash flow versioning and what-if analysis
  • Drill-down capabilities to provide visibility to underlying cash flow components
  • Dynamic synchronization between cash flow and planning/forecasting activities

See what our customers are saying

“I have used other budgeting software in the past and Planning Maestro is one of the most user-friendly ones out there.”

Lesley Delaney
CFO, Carroll County Memorial Hospital

“With Planning Maestro, I have access to so much more information than I had before to really show what’s going on.”

Jenny Barker
Senior Budget Manager, The Housing Authority of Snohomish County

“With Planning Maestro, I can change forecasts and get new information faster and without headaches. It used to take a week to do that.”

Joan Edelman
CFO, Wakeland Housing and Development Corporation

“We’re able to spend less time talking about the numbers and more time on how we’re going to get there. Our budget sessions are much more strategic.”

Scott Coleson
Controller, Four Star Freightliner

“We just finished our current year budget, so we are now starting year two of using Planning Maestro. Creating the budgets this year was a dream.”

Shelly Golly
Price Family Vineyards & Estates