Finance leaders can find themselves behind the ball when their forecasts and analyses contain outdated information or don’t reflect market changes or economic disruptions. That makes it difficult to gain and keep executives’ and business departments’ trust in the data you provide, slowing the entire organization down.
That may be one reason that less than 20% of CFOs feel that their FP&A functions are efficient, according to industry data.
To improve data confidence, Finance and IT teams need to work together, using tools to aid in creating rolling forecasts, reports or continuous insights. With continuous forecasts, the data and information updates as quickly as the business itself.
During this year’s Excelerate Finance conference, Christine Harms, CFO of TLB Construction, and Brandon Sharp, CIO of Brookfield Residential, gave a masterclass in how leaders can make the transition from static to dynamic planning and implement rolling forecasting methods.
In this article, we’ll unpack how Christine and Brandon lean on dynamic planning to support their organizations, and the steps you can take to implement a “living plan” in your own finance operations.
What Is a Living Plan?
Think of a “living plan” as an always-on rolling forecast. In contrast to static planning, a living plan can help your team or organization stay ahead of changing market dynamics, improve accuracy, mitigate risk and ultimately make better decisions.
That’s not to say that there aren’t challenges with implementing a living plan, however. The first step towards moving to a continuous plan is having the right data foundation. But by taking the time to revise your FP&A systems in service of real-time data flows, your organization can become more efficient, streamlined and productive.
Brookfield Residential: Implementing Rolling Forecasts Leads to Hourly Insights
Brandon says that the Brookfield Residential team was able to start “living the plan,” or become a more dynamic organization, by increasing the frequency of data reporting in Vena (which Brookfield Residential uses to power their FP&A processes) to minutes, rather than hours.
Brandon says that if Brookfield sells a house, be it in Texas or Ontario, the company’s data reflects the sale quickly. “The information, within 30 minutes, is available for Vena to consume directly from the data warehouse.” Before, that could take significantly longer, and in aggregate, it meant that the company was unable to accurately forecast long-term cash flows, which cascaded down, impacting other reports and analyses.
With faster, automatic updates to the company’s operational data, which then intersects with Vena, Brookfield’s IT and Finance teams can alert key stakeholders to how shifting conditions could affect the company’s bottom line.
“We are way more equipped, way smarter, way more insightful about the ongoing nature of the business, day-to-day, and hour-to-hour,” Brandon says.
TLB Construction: Transforming the Timesheet Process for Smarter Operations
Similarly, Christine says that TLB Construction was able to drive positive outcomes by moving from paper timesheets to digital ones. This was especially impactful because timesheets are crucial in the construction industry; they can act as a source of truth for the time spent on a jobsite from both a project and operational planning perspective. Timesheets can also inform financial forecasting for payroll and headcount.
“In that process, we had several obstacles in our way,” she says, including language and technology barriers. But using paper timesheets was eating up too many resources, becoming a significant draw on time and human capital.
By incorporating digital timesheets, Christine and her team were able to break the logjam. The process went from “a full-time person from 40 hours per week re-keying timesheets” to “a four-hour process every two weeks,” saving 38 hours of manpower per week.
As for how TLB did it? Using Vena’s native Excel integration to leverage what they had already created. “You don’t have to share your workbook with another software or platform,” Christine says about pairing Excel and Vena. “Being able to scale the usability with Microsoft products, with Vena sitting on top of everything, it brings it all together.”
The Three “Cs” of Successful Transformation
At the core of both Brookfield and TLB’s transformations from static to dynamic planning was this crucial approach: establishing deep partnerships between their finance and IT teams, and doing so with a sense of conviction.
In fact, that’s one of the “three Cs” that Brandon mentioned during the presentation.
“The three Cs that I live by and have repeated many times are conviction, clarity and capital. Those three things have to come together to create magic,” Brandon says. “You need executive sponsorship and conviction to do something. You have the clarity for what it’s going to look like and why it’s important. And you have the capital to commit to the transformation,” he adds. “A lot of companies have the conviction and the clarity, but they’re unwilling to invest, so it doesn’t work.”
In the case of both Brookfield and TLB, however, the three Cs did come together, and each company was able to make a meaningful change to its processes, giving them a real-time view into the business’s operations, allowing their teams to become more efficient and cost-effective.
IT and Finance Partnership: Inside the Tech Stack
The partnership between IT and finance teams was critical to both Brookfield and TLB’s success. A crucial aspect of what facilitated this partnership was the choice to use tools that supported the business’s existing tech stacks.
Vena’s native integration with Microsoft tools—notably Excel, Power BI, and Fabric—allowed each company to seamlessly transition into the Vena platform. There was no need to move away from Excel, which most FP&A professionals know top to bottom. Vena’s native Excel interface, also meant there wasn’t much of a learning curve when each company adopted Vena, helping to reduce ongoing demands on IT.
“Excel is the universal product,” says Christine. “It’s the software that talks to every single department.”
And when pairing Excel with the broader Microsoft 365 suite, incorporating Vena’s other features acts as the cherry on top.
“We are a deep, deep Microsoft shop,” says Brandon. “Ultimately, for us, Power BI, Power Automate and Copilot—those are the layers for us that sit on top of everything. And Vena aggregates and creates forward projections along with the power of the data warehouse for operational visibility.”
Take the First Steps Toward Living Your Plan
While adopting more dynamic processes sounds great in theory, it can be difficult to put into practice. So, how can you start taking actionable steps toward doing it?
One way is to focus on quick wins.
“I was brought on board to make change, to be a change agent,” says Christine. “That took a lot of rapport-building, a lot of people would say, ‘We’ve been doing it this way for 20 years, why should we change it?’ So just building rapport with them, having those quick wins and reminding them that you’re behind them and support them can be helpful. Then, incorporating the changes and seeing the difference can win them over. It’s not easy, of course, and every organization is different.”
“Every company has its own DNA,” says Brandon. “You have to understand the spirit and pulse of that particular business group.”
But once you can zero in on what works (through small wins, potentially), the plan may come together, and you can start living it. “Living the plan for us has been natural for many, many years,” Brandon says. “We just now had the opportunity over the last couple of years to bring it together into Vena and see the actual long-term cash flow impact.”
Ready to live your company’s plan? Watch “Living the Plan: Enabling Continuous Forecasting Through Vena and the Microsoft Ecosystem” from Excelerate Finance 2025 on demand.
