Like clockwork, the business budgeting and forecasting processes come along every year, and CFOs and budget managers struggle through it. Data collection is one of the most taxing activities that plague organizations, leaving lesser time for the actual planning, which is reflected in the productivity and accuracy of their budgets and forecasts.
Today’s businesses want to be agile—relying on predictions made months prior is not likely to help organizations reach their goals. Alongside this, many financial leaders are coming to the realization that they can improve the efficiency of what they do by upgrading the solutions they use for budgeting and forecasting. To that end, there has been an ongoing innovation in the applications and tools that budget managers use, in order to address the various business demands that the future brings. These include dynamic cloud solutions, device-agnostic mobility enablement, integration with real-time analytics, and predictive models. The market for cloud-based planning tools is growing because of its lower cost of ownership. This has enabled even middle-market companies to afford and deploy these sophisticated budgeting and forecasting processes.
Corporate budgeting and planning is a method that pierces through the whole organization. So, businesses are required to connect various dots in the commerce so that any change in one facet will without delay flow into its forecasts. Therefore, it is now significant for enterprises that changes flow effortlessly in real-time and that changing assumptions be tested and accessed as per requirement. Moreover, corporate planning in the present times should always be real-time and readily modifiable for the finance user.
Furthermore, deep-dive analytics, machine learning, and other statistical means are now being employed to remove biases in forecasts or cases of excessive optimism. By following the method, variances will be on acceptable levels, and efforts are not needlessly duplicated. Besides, for a business to be agile, it is vital and trendy to execute multiple scenario analysis. Decisions taken by decision-makers or managers must be backed by constant, real-time forecasts and through a presentation of multiple scenario analysis. Also, given the high level of ambiguity that exists in the market today, organizations need to consider alternative outcomes and its effect on the business so that the dangers are spotted early on in the horizon and decisions are as strategic as achievable.
The ability to harness all of the potentials is how forward-thinking CFOs can thrive. In addition, assessing where they can add value to the organization so that these technologies act as a bridge between the old approaches of doing things and one that is more streamlined, collaborative, and most importantly, accurate is what will make them get to their budgeting goals faster.
In response to such needs and demands, CFO Tech Outlook editorial team, guided by industry veterans and analysts, has reviewed many firms in the budgeting and forecasting landscape and shortlisted the ones that are at the forefront of tackling the industry challenges. The listing provides a comprehensive overview of their promising software and the ways in which it can help the businesses.
We present to you CFO Tech Outlook’s “Top 10 Budgeting and Forecasting Solution Providers - 2018.”
