Financial planning is fundamental to company operations, but it is also true that operations have a significant impact on the financial plan. To get and stay on the road of growth, it is essential to manage finances carefully, assess tasks and seize opportunities. What exactly is corporate financial planning? How does Jedox support this? Let’s find out!
What is a financial plan and why is it important?
A business plan defines the core directions to be followed. This ideally includes a financial plan, which gives an overview of the company's financial situation. It summarises the statuses, objectives and what needs to be done to ensure stable and profitable operations.
The financial plan is about scheduling revenues, and summarising expenses. Forecasting financial movements are crucial to avoid liquidity problems.
In building a business, clarity of vision is one of the most important prerequisites. Managers need to know what the financial options are, how far they can stretch in terms of spending and, not least, what is essential for business development. Corporate financial planning helps the company to take a step forward.
A financial plan is a must for all companies. It is particularly important if the business is a fresh start-up or if the aim is to launch a new product or service. The financial status quo can also be fortunate if there is a change in management or ownership so that newcomers can easily pick up the pace.
Basically, in most cases, the goal of the company is growing. However, if this becomes too much of a push, it is always worthwhile to prepare a financial report. This can easily be developed into a financial plan, which includes where you want to channel the extra income.
Planning will help you to take stock of the factors affecting your processes. In effect, we are trying to model what the outputs might be and what their financial implications are.
What is good corporate financial planning?
The importance of a financial plan is therefore unquestionable, but it is not easy to produce a good and usable corporate financial plan. Here are the characteristics of a good financial plan:
- Honest: first and foremost, the financial plan must be honest. It only makes sense if it presents a true picture, otherwise, business decisions will be made based on false data.
- Comprehensive: a financial plan is only useful if it includes all income and expenditure. If some are left out, then it no longer provides a realistic picture.
- Realistic: it is unfortunate if the financial plan assumes unrealistic change, i.e. if it overestimates revenues. This can completely mislead the whole planning.
- Clear: a well-prepared financial plan will clearly show when the company can expect a return on investment.
Corporate financial planning with Jedox
Jedox is an EPM platform that integrates planning, analysis, and reporting processes. It is an important player in corporate financial planning, providing self-service budgeting and the ability to create analytics and BI dashboards.
The use of Excel for financial planning is standard practice in many companies. It is used with confidence by most office workers, at least for the functions they use frequently. This is precisely the reason why most people are reluctant to give up the power of habit.
The designers at Jedox were aware of this, and as a result, they have created a platform that builds on the foundations of Excel but goes way beyond it. It enables the creation of multidimensional databases, in-depth data monitoring, version tracking, immediacy, and remote access.
Thanks to Jedox, collaboration is much easier, and efficiency is increased. It can be accessed via the web and mobile, and data integration tools make it easy to connect to existing systems.
Discover the potential of Jedox and you'll never want to use anything else for financial planning again!
