Forecasting

The more things change, the more certain things need to stay put, especailly when it comes to drawing up the annual budget, which has to contend with with a variety of internal and external fluctuations before it is even out of the starting blocks.

So often the ink hasn’t even dried when the tedious exercise of blending the actual performance to date and future budget, kicks in. Not to mention that the remaining months of the budget may no longer be in line with the latest thinking of what the business will do.

With this in mind, we deploy the IBM Cognos solution to allow for a new version (or multiple versions) that keeps your actual and budget intact, while allowing you to use your actual to date as confirmed, and the remaining budget as a starting and not an end point. This gives budget holders the flexibility to tweak only the areas of the business plan that have changed, with full audit trail and comparability.

Business managers can now see the impact of these changes simply and quickly, without lengthy copy and paste and reconciling that usually accompanies this labour intensive process.

Cash flow forecasting is an area that can also be greatly improved. Working with debtors days, supplier days, stock days, VAT and income tax payments, and the flows of the forecast you have drawn up, you will be able to model the impact on your cash. This gives you a better understanding if the organisation can, in fact, afford to approve a proposed business plan.