Capital Asset Planning

Every company invests in capital assets. It’s the machinery, equipment, hardware, and software you use to make your business work and it represents real financial value for your business. Yet tracking, managing, and planning those capital assets and their associated depreciation expense can be a tedious and complex activity.

Using spreadsheets for capital asset planning typically slows down processes and leads to unnecessary errors, including data entry errors, missing data fields, formula errors, duplicate entries, and other common mistakes. With capital asset planning such an important component of balance sheet and income statement planning, it’s risky to leave such an important financial process open to so many potential errors. What’s more, managing and orchestrating capital asset planning via emails and spreadsheets can lead to even more errors, missed deadlines, and a slower, more cumbersome process.

Continuous Planning software helps ease the complexity of capital asset planning, not only by automating and standardizing depreciation calculations, but also by eliminating the errors and manual burden of a spreadsheet-driven process. Continuous Planning further integrates capital asset planning into your broader financial activities to automatically add associated depreciation expenses to income statements and add assets and liabilities into balance sheet plans.

This automation also increases accuracy and confidence simply by eliminating human error and slow manual data transfers.

With full access to all of the data needed for capital asset planning, finance can spend more time analyzing and actually planning and less time trying to find and aggregate the right data. This then drives more accurate income statement planning, and allows for easier budgeting and forecasting of future assets and liabilities, resulting in a more complete economic picture of the future state of the business.

Continuous Planning also eliminates the slow, tedious creation of reports based on ad hoc spreadsheets or cobbled together from data across multiple systems. It allows for faster, easier analysis of insights via intuitive dashboards, custom and pre-built report templates, and drill down into source data for fast answers to questions. The outcome is a more agile and responsive finance team and executives who have complete confidence in the resulting reports, forecasts, and plans.

Capital asset planning in Planful enables finance to easily manage and plan capital assets and incorporate them into the balance sheet planning process, automatically calculate the associated depreciation expenses for income statement planning, and create standard calculation rules by asset class to automate the calculation of future depreciation expenses.