Leading NetSuite ERP Consultant Reviews NetSuite Financial Planning

How Can Your Company Benefit From Improved Financial Planning?

In this two-part blog NetSuite ERP consultants discuss how you can use NetSuite’s Financial Planning module to improve your financial planning and analysis processes and performance. Part 1 of this blog will focus on the signs that will tell you that your financial planning and analysis processes need to be improved. Part 2 will suggest how you can modify these processes to improve your financial planning and analysis performance.

Financial Planning and Analysis is an important discipline for businesses looking for a strategic advantage in today’s competitive world. Using the capabilities of NetSuite’s Financial Planning module from Adaptive Insights, it’s now easier than ever to do this accurately using actual data without messy, error-prone spreadsheets or external planning tools.

DSG’s Financial Planning and Analysis best practices are designed to help you review and improve your financial planning process as an integral part of your DSG Realize implementation and to continue this improvement during DSG Optimize support. But how do you know if your existing planning processes can be improved?

There are some obvious indicators that your processes can be improved such as out-of-date planning templates that no longer reflect your business needs or broken links and formula errors in these templates that undermine the accuracy and effectiveness of your planning process. However, for those businesses that believe financial planning can be a strategic and competitive advantage, improvement goes beyond these obvious fixes and focuses on issues such as how to:

• Control multiple versions of your planning cycles, or to manage multiple planning cycles simultaneously
• Plan for multiple, disparate business units that have different financial drivers, calendars, or currencies
• Produce alternate views of your financial plans for internal management and external reporting
• Quickly and accurately consolidate financial planning data to create a company-wide view without sacrificing the ability to track back to their original source or allow additional updates
• Provide users with their own reporting capabilities to make them more self-sufficient and better informed

In addition to these functional needs, there are also process-based issues that bedevil the business planning process for example, when do you know if your planners are really done with their plans and won’t be sending in “just one more update” right after you consolidate all of the plans?

If your organization is exhibiting any of these signs, there’s a good chance that you would benefit from reviewing and improving your financial planning and analysis processes. In Part 2 of this blog, we’ll suggest some best practices to do exactly that. DSG’s Financial Planning and Analysis consultants and best practices enable you to get maximum value and insights from your data to enable your forecasting and business planning to be more accurate, timely and agile. For more information, please visit www.dsgcloud.com.

The original blog was posted here.

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