How to succeed with your planning, budgeting, and forecasting process

Spreadsheets often start as just a list for storing information and there is minimal process documentation, support or maintenance for these worksheets. Despite the fact that desktop applications such as Microsoft Office are included in the standard configuration of users' PCs, very little formal training is ever given to spreadsheet users.

Businesses don’t stand still so why should your forecasts? According to the results of research conducted by IBM, rolling forecasts provide companies with 12% more accuracy, spend 50% less time on budget preparation and increase their profitability by 10%.

Where many businesses start small, a simple spreadsheet can adequately perform the limited tasks required of it. As the company grows, your spreadsheets can get more complex and harder to manage, by which point it feels like it will be too difficult to move to a different reporting tool.

Thirty years after its debut, Microsoft Excel is still the preferred tool for budgeting and planning projects. However, its popularity is declining, due in most part to the rise of technology and subscription-based pricing for a myriad of SaaS-based products.

Spreadsheets are an essential tool for all types of organisations and businesses rely on them heavily, particularly for financial computations. The most popular spreadsheet program globally is, of course, Microsoft Excel, it’s used by an estimated 750 million people.

Spreadsheets were never designed for collaboration, yet they are the single most used program among teams and co-workers. They often start out as a quick document for storing, formatting or calculating information but evolve into important documents and are often the core records for an organisation.

The newest iteration of planning, analysis and reporting systems is a powerful game-changer that unites company departments and boosts competitiveness. It’s called xP&A – the abbreviation of extended financial planning and analysis.

Senior executives are demanding more detail in their management reports. The amount of data available to finance departments has exploded and decision makers see this as an opportunity to get more insight into how the business is performing.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significant potential to enhance decision-making for Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) by providing data-driven insights, automating routine tasks, and enabling more accurate forecasts.

It can be a real challenge to prepare and present your data to your management team. With the help of management reporting, you’ll be able to work more efficiently and make better informed decisions. We’ll present 3 tips on how to prepare your management reports.

CPM, or Corporate Performance Management, is a process within corporate management aimed at measuring and optimizing the performance of an organization. CPM encompasses a range of activities, including budgeting, planning, forecasting, reporting, and analysis.

It's very common for businesses to use a budgeting software, but what should you think of when choosing a budgeting software for your business?

In many organisations manual budgeting processes over-burden staff and create masses of data which overwhelms department heads and stops them seeing the bigger picture.

If you’re working in a large organization, you’re probably aware of how time-consuming the budget process can be. In this article we’ll give you tips on how to save time and still create a successful budget process

How can you make your budget process more successful and maximise the effort that was invested in creating it? Of course, there are many factors to consider but we’ve chosen to highlight five key areas that will enable and help you create a smoother, value-creating and collaborative budget process.

After living in uncertainty, priorities have changed across all businesses, and that includes the finance function. According to Deloitte's latest CFO survey from July 2021, there are a few things that a CFO needs to prioritize. In this article, we'll present the top 3 things a CFO should and needs to prioritize.

Integrated company-wide business planning is the holy grail for most large organisations yet they have failed to accomplish this ambition due to two main issues: difficulty in coordinating cross-functional initiatives and lack of technology support.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, what is it, and what is the difference?

What makes reports easy to read and compelling to the eyes? Mercur wanted to know, and conducted a user study in the spring of 2017. With the use of eye tracking technology we analysed how users with different skill levels would read reports, and how the layout would impact the speed and accuracy of decision making.

The ability to process information swiftly is essential. If your business can’t manage your data efficiently, your company’s financial performance will surely underperform. At Mercur we have developed our own database Veloxic which helps Financial Planning and Analysis.

This year has perhaps resulted in changes in your planning, budgeting and forecasting. The initial planning, budgeting and forecasting for the year 2023 may have changed quite a lot during the year, and forced it to adapt to the current climate!

Management Reporting refers to the process of creating, analyzing, and presenting information about various aspects of an organization's performance to enable decision-makers to make well-informed decisions about the future.

Uncertain times create the need for more frequent forecasts and time for analyzing and comparing different future scenarios. We give you 5 tips on how to simulate future scenarios using scenario planning

Excel has long been a target for hackers; all it takes is one person to open an attachment in an email and all of your systems can become infected. While there are many alternatives for spreadsheets most organisations around the world still consider them as a core component in their IT structure and admit they support critical parts of the businesses.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support decision making in key areas such as budgeting, capital allocation and even corporate strategy and as a result, it is increasingly being deployed in corporate performance management tools (CPM).