Planning and Budgeting
Financial and operational plans provide the detail of how the business will operate, improve and enter new ventures in line with the Strategic plan. We all know that Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting should be some of the most valuable activities in the management of business performance, helping to create viable strategies and plans of action, allocate and align resources to critical activities, and providing early warning and insight into the drivers that impact business performance.
Frustratingly, the processes and systems often don’t provide the support the business needs. The cycles are lengthy, error-prone and effort-intensive, producing plans and forecasts that have questionable value for running the business, which the business regards with caution and that restrict Finance to number-crunching and report generating activities.
This should not, and does not need to be, the case. Many organisations are harnessing established technologies and best practices to remove the drudgery from the core Finance activities, enabling them to contribute more strategically to driving business performance through higher value activities such as scenario analysis, contingency planning, activity based management, and project portfolio management.
The benefits to best-practice organisations, across all areas, are well documented:
· Spend half as much time on planning and forecasting, and yet be more effective
· Spend 90% of reporting & analysis time gaining and using insight, and only 10% on the number-crunching
(average organisations spend 50% on crunching, 50% on using)
· More than halve the costs for Planning, Forecasting, Consolidation (saving £130k per £100m of turnover)
Paragon has helped many international organisations transform and optimise their planning and budgeting processes, modelling the business based on its performance drivers and implementing best-of-breed software solutions that enable all participants in the process to contribute to accurate, timely plans and budgets.
Our services are tailored to meet your specific needs, but include:
Planning & Budgeting Online Survey – a quick, online survey, benchmarking your organisation against 150 leading European companies
Planning & Budgeting Diagnostic – a detailed assessment of all key aspects of your planning processes, identifying bottlenecks and corrective activities
Planning Review – providing improvement recommendations across the technical, governance & compliance, activities and user satisfaction dimensions of your planning processes
Planning Upgrade – designed to help you upgrade your planning systems, aligning the technology, people and processes to best-practice planning whilst avoiding implementation pitfalls
