Continuous Planning – Structure for Finance, Flexibility for the Business

Planning is an essential part of every business. Marketing managers plan how lead generation campaigns fit within their broader pipeline-building goals. Sales managers plan for territory performance, sales rep quotas, and productivity capacities to help meet quarterly revenue targets. The director of operations plans supply, production, and logistics to ensure customer demands are met. And the executive team builds out plans for headcount adjustments, resource and budget needs, and the strategic direction taken to achieve broader company and investor objectives.

Behind all of this dynamic planning lies finance, who must take all of the bits and pieces of information these individuals and teams use separately and bring them all together to build structured corporate financial plans and reports. While sales, marketing, operations, and other operational teams require flexibility to build bespoke plans with tailored user experiences, on-demand data access, and high-frequency touch points, finance needs highly accurate, repeatable, and structured plans and reports to meet the requirements of their audiences. While these planning needs might seem in stark contrast to each other, they’re really two sides of the same coin. Both are interrelated and codependent on each other, and both are critically important to supporting the overall strategic goals of the company.

High-Frequency Cycles, High Engagement

Continuous planning is a vision for finance and business leadership that drives faster, more agile, and more iterative planning and decision cycles. It elevates the financial IQ of the organization so that everyone is engaged in the planning and decision-making process in a more meaningful way. That means plans are more accurate, insights and course-corrections are more frequent, and actions are more immediate. This puts the organization in a position to be more competitive, more innovative, and more prosperous – and finance is the strategic advisor at the heart of it all.

Easy and Fast

A continuous planning platform is the vehicle to take you on this journey. A strong platform can (1) easily integrate disconnected data from disparate operational systems and provide a trusted single source of truth, (2) give finance the structure, accuracy, and productivity they need, and (3) give business users the planning flexibility, tailored user interfaces and experiences, and on-demand data access that they desire.

Lucky for you, that platform is already here.

Finance deserves to be the strategic core of every organization. They deserve to be able to make better decisions that benefit their customers, employees, shareholders, and economies. We know that companies do better when they plan continuously, when their teams have a higher financial IQ, and when finance asserts an active role in organizational strategy.

Let us help you move toward a vision of continuous planning, ease the structured planning efforts on finance, and improve the dynamic planning efforts of everyone so that the entire organization can thrive.