According to the inaugural Vena Industry Benchmark Report, 40% of businesses don’t do any scenario modeling before making adjustments to forecasts. The new report draws from the insights of 350 business leaders and finance and operations professionals across industries and from around the world. When asked if organizations engage in a scenario modeling plan before making forecasting adjustments, 40% of survey respondents replied “no,” while 60% said “yes.” This finding raises questions especially relevant during this period of unprecedented change: If you aren’t regularly testing business plans against potential future scenarios, how can you ensure forecasts are as well-informed as possible? And without thoroughly analyzing what might happen in the future, how can business leaders align goals and prepare for what does happen? With business conditions evolving as rapidly as they are today, businesses need to be ready for anything—whether that’s making it through a cash crunch, preparing for resource reallocations or adapting to a new operating model. But if there’s no clear process in place for determining how potential changes will affect the bottom line, it’s difficult to plan proactively based on reliable financial assumptions. That’s why scenario modeling and analysis is such an important aspect of effective finance-led business planning. By testing budgets and forecasts against a range of assumptions and business drivers—both internal and external—you can mitigate risk and better understand how decisions made today will impact the bottom line tomorrow. And even though it’s impossible to prepare for every possible business outcome, modeling multiple scenarios helps you identify your most variable KPIs, measure the influence of changes and then factor that information into your business plans going forward. To make the job of modeling multiple scenarios easier, move away from manually running models in offline spreadsheets and leverage predictive analytics to generate reliable scenario models in minutes. Plus, by providing a consolidated view of company-wide data and conducting variance analysis between previously forecasted periods, you can account for both historical trends and real-time actuals when choosing which scenarios to analyze—ultimately resulting in a more thorough, focused planning process with inputs from every business function. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that budgets and forecasts will always need to change at some point. But through agile scenario analysis, you can turn change into an opportunity to re-align your business plans and chart the best course for the future—no matter what that future might look like. Learn more about how you can empower your finance team with scenario modeling so you can make faster, smarter decisions for the future of your business. Download Vena’s Industry Benchmark Report here.

As the modern finance function continues to evolve, teams are relying on BPM solutions for better budgeting, forecasting and reporting. A new survey reveals that finance teams are most interested in budgeting and forecasting functions from their business performance management (BPM) software solutions. They’re using these tools to improve key reporting processes and support strategic, finance-led business planning. The Pulse of Performance Management survey—which is released annually by advisory firm BPM Partners—provides an unbiased examination of the trends and technologies that are shaping the BPM software market. This year’s survey focused on finance’s evolution into an agile, forward-thinking planning function. It also explored the value of BPM solutions when it comes to adapting to changing business conditions. When asked to identify the BPM components they’re most interested in, 76% of survey respondents said “budgeting and forecasting.” “Financial reporting” and “financial modeling” were second and third on the list at 68% and 48%, respectively. Furthermore, when asked to point out the primary drivers behind their BPM software projects, “improving management reporting” topped the ranking at 66%. The next two responses in that category were “more frequent, agile planning” (45%) and “better decision making” (40%). Respondents were also asked to identify which aspects of finance transformation are most important to their teams. The top three responses were “operational reporting” (63%), “increased planning frequency” (57%) and “predictive forecasting” (51%). In today’s ever-changing business environment, it’s easy to see why finance teams are turning to BPM software solutions to support budgeting, forecasting and reporting. Modern BPM tools allow finance teams to consolidate company-wide data for real-time planning and analysis—ultimately empowering key stakeholders with the information they need to make agile, data-driven business decisions. Source system integrations and process automation eliminate the manual tasks associated with budgeting and forecasting, such as data entry, template generation and variance reporting. With more time for meaningful analysis, finance teams can shift from static annual budgets to a more continuous reforecasting and planning cadence. This is critical, because if teams are still relying on static budgets to plan through the year, their numbers will be obsolete as soon as business conditions change—making it tough to plan for the future with any degree of confidence.  That’s why budgeting and forecasting features are so important in the BPM software market right now. Vena Solutions, for example, supports streamlined budget orchestration, real-time forecasting and agile, finance-led business planning. Vena won a BPM Pulse Award this year for its superior budgeting and planning performance, earning an overall satisfaction rating of 4.62 out of five. The software is also known for its ease of use, scalability and quick time to value for customers. With the right budgeting and forecasting tools, finance teams can report on key insights faster and always ensure their business plans are based on reliable, up-to-date data. And as more finance teams evolve into strategic, forward-thinking business partners, that kind of insight will be crucial when it comes to planning for today and tomorrow. Discover how Vena can streamline your budgeting process and enable accurate, real-time forecasting so you can plan confidently across every function of your business. Check out BPM Partners’ 2020 Pulse of Performance Management webinar on demand here.

Data drives modern business. It provides a foundation of information that lets your finance team look back at what your organization has already done, better understand what’s happening in the moment and see forward into what’s ahead. In doing so, it allows you to analyze what’s working and to understand what’s not. So what happens when your data becomes a hindrance rather than a help? Whether you’re having problems sourcing the right data or converting it into useful insights, spending too much time organizing data or haven’t built the right technology infrastructure around it, data challenges can lead to greater issues across your finance team, making it hard for you to deliver value to the organization as a whole. And that can have a negative impact on your business, leading to weak insights, untimely reporting, failed processes and decreased productivity. All of which are hard to compensate for during times of change when you require as much visibility as possible to build the right strategy to thrive. In the recently released Vena Q2-2020 Industry Benchmark Report, we asked 350 business leaders and finance and operations professionals from across industries and around the globe to identify their biggest data challenges. Here’s what we found—listed in order of most challenging to least: Multiple disparate and disconnected data Too much time wrangling data Getting meaningful and actionable insights Lack of data expertise Too much data Consider each in turn. Challenge #1: Multiple disparate and disconnected data Multiple disparate and disconnected data was the most common data challenge for organizations, as revealed in our benchmark report. Identified by 57% of respondents as a challenge, it’s proof that data is only good to you if you can get to it and use it in a meaningful way. This means connecting data that comes in different formats and from different data sources to create a unified view and one single version of the truth. From there, you can then draw on it to build your business processes, fuel data-driven storytelling and navigate your business through change. It will also help you make decisions on an ad hoc basis and react with agility at every step. This is where the right technology comes in as well, connecting data and putting it at your fingertips so you can begin to extract true insight and even create a framework for tools such as machine learning and AI. Challenge #2: Too much time wrangling data The second biggest data challenge among survey respondents? The amount of time spent wrangling data. Of the organizations surveyed, 51.5% named this as an issue. And it’s no wonder. Manually gathering, selecting, cleaning and organizing data so that you can turn it into actionable insights can be an unruly and time-consuming process. Again, here’s where aligning data across disparate data sources and creating a single source of truth makes that data easier to access so that it’s fully transparent and easier to put to use. It's also a critical step in getting true value from your data by removing any barriers so that you’re able to get to those insights faster, increase the agility of your planning process and better prepare for change. Challenge #3: Getting meaningful and actionable insights Raw and clean data means nothing if you can’t turn it into meaningful and actionable insights. Yet 48.5% of organizations have issues doing exactly that. That means almost half of businesses aren’t using data to its fullest potential to enable the strategic information needed to drive data-driven decision making and plan for today and tomorrow. To drive strategic growth within organizations, finance teams can draw on technology to access information needed. The right business intelligence tools will turn that data into actionable insights in order to build and support data-driven decision making. By doing so, you can bring in processes that will lead to better strategy and growth, so that you leverage your data to feed insights and drive efficient and productive processes that align with your organization’s greater strategy and goals. Challenge #4: Lack of data expertise Accessing data and putting it into action relies on the right technology and processes, but it’s people-driven too. Your people need to be able to create true data-driven processes. And since 41% of organizations named a lack of data expertise as a key challenge, it’s clear many still don’t have that organization-wide knowledge in place. Yet creating a business-wide team of data experts is a key step to organizational agility and success. Building a data-driven business with organization-wide expertise requires data transparency and the ability to use data easily to write reports, create dashboards and establish a data dictionary that everybody can put into action. To reinforce this, you’ll need ways of visualizing data in a way that will communicate insights and enable strategy and growth. Challenge #5: Too much data Is there ever such a thing as too much data? While it wasn’t a challenge for most of our survey respondents, almost a quarter are clearly struggling, with 22% of organizations seeing it as a challenge. The challenge of too much data, though, can often be a symptom of another issue—inefficient technology, maybe, or the problem of prioritizing data quantity over data quality. It may also be a byproduct of one of the other challenges listed above. But too much data can also be a sign that you don’t have the right people focused on it. In order to keep on top of your data, you need a team that brings a range of skillsets to the table and that’s equipped to organize that data and extract the insights you need. Your team should also collaborate with other departments to put those insights into action and to identify the best metrics and align on them across the business. If you don’t have executive support to expand your data-driven processes or the team that oversees them, the amount of data you’re trying to coordinate and draw from can of course feel overwhelming. Or maybe there’s pressure from above to expand your data-driven processes without the resources to act on it. Either way, solving the people issue and getting that executive alignment is critical to succeeding and using data to help your organization thrive. Other Data Challenges Finally, a small cohort—only 5% of organizations—identified “other” in the list of key data challenges. Identifying what those data problems are will help you create a plan to handle them—and let you evolve your solutions across people, process and technology to overcome your data issues. After all, in today’s data-driven business environment, data challenges are business challenges—getting in the way of organizational growth and agility. Solving these challenges is critical to building effective strategy and planning processes. It’s also ongoing—just like the data is always changing, how you interact with it may as well, introducing new challenges and ways to optimize your processes along the way. But getting the most out of your data means staying on top of those challenges so that your organization can stay on top of business and market changes too. Download your free copy of the Vena Q2-2020 Industry Benchmark Report today, or find out more about Vena’s solutions for agile planning and reporting.

Market and business model changes can seem insurmountable—and planning with agility feels difficult when that change is looming. So how do finance teams stay on top of it? When Vena surveyed 350 business leaders and finance and operations professionals for our recently released Q2-2020 Industry Benchmark Report, we wanted to find out exactly that. And there were some surprising conclusions. One of the most unexpected, though, was how unprepared many organizations are for change. Among the findings: more than half of organizations, at 56%, don’t have any kind of early warning system in place. But what does an early warning system involve and why is it important? And what do you need to consider as you introduce one to your business? This blog post will cover: What is an early warning system? Why is having an early warning system important? Examples of leading and lagging indicators. Operational vs. financial reviews. Early warning systems in practice. What Is an Early Warning System? An early warning system is a set of data and processes that gives you insight into the market and business forces happening around you. It provides you with ongoing, ever-evolving early warning signals that let you evaluate your plan in the wake of those forces, to determine whether you’re still on the path to achieving your mission, or if you need to make adjustments to course correct. It also helps you identify whether changes are a product of oversights in your plan or bigger market forces—and whether those market forces are temporary hurdles you need to overcome or more permanent shifts that need more attention. Why Is Having an Early Warning System Important? As a financial professional, an early warning system can help you get on top of change before it significantly impacts your business, to align your team and data early and make shifts as necessary. It involves regular reviews of leading and lagging indicators and identifies your organization’s vulnerabilities to build agility and resilience into your planning process. By putting a standardized process in place, it lets you stay ready for change—and gives you the tools you need to deal with it when it inevitably arrives. Examples of Leading and Lagging Indicators Leading and lagging indicators are key to an early warning system and can help you better understand your business and the market around it—both where it’s been and where it’s going. By identifying the leading and lagging indicators important to your business and watching them closely, you’ll be able to act with more agility and determine your best response early while you still have time to plan and the room to make adjustments as needed. They each play a different role: Leading indicators are those KPIs or metrics that are most likely to change before any large-scale market or business changes happen. They can be used to demonstrate future trends before any financial output of business shifts become evident and inform course corrections early. While leading indicators aren’t 100% accurate, they’re critical to any kind of early warning system. Examples might include traffic, demand, website visits, impressions or trending hashtags. Customer or employee satisfaction—as predictors of customer loyalty and retention or company performance and turnover—can also be leading indicators. Together, these types of metrics can give you a picture of what the future might hold.   Lagging indicators, meanwhile, are the opposite. Otherwise known as trailing indicators, they’re like a rearview mirror looking back at where you’ve already been. That may not seem as critical to an early warning system meant to predict change, until you realize that you don’t—and can’t—get everything right all the time. Sometimes plans go wrong and having an eye on the past lets you understand whether you achieved the results you were looking for—and if not, why. All of which helps you prepare for the future and build a better plan. Lagging indicators might include revenue, profit and growth. And since those are things you’re already measuring and comparing with others in your industry, it’s not much of a leap to start looking at where you’re faltering to determine where you’re most vulnerable to change. Together, leading and lagging indicators provide a picture of your company and how it fits into the market around it as well as the trends emerging around the corner. In doing so, they help you recognize where your business might be affected so that you’re ready to roll with any changes. But for that to happen, you need ways to review, understand and deal with those new changes with agility and confidence, along with a regular process that keeps the entire idea of change top of mind. Operational vs. Financial Reviews Change has a way of sneaking up on you if you aren’t keeping a close enough eye on it. This is why regular operational and financial reviews are also critical to an effective early warning system. Through monthly or even weekly reviews—with up-to-date dashboards that help you share and visualize the metrics you’re looking at—you’ll be able to stay on top of new trends and identify how your business may be vulnerable to them. You’ll also be able to keep key stakeholders informed and on board with your plans. Operational reviews allow you to look at the bigger picture business concerns around your operating procedures, product or service operating margins, product profitability, communication and so on. This type of review will help you identify yellow and red flags related to lagging and leading indicators, such as customer and employee satisfaction, product pipeline or brand recognition. Operational data can be especially effective in providing early warning signals, offering a view into future sales and revenue.   Financial reviews, on the other hand, consider such things as profit and loss as well as budgets and forecasting. They also look at lagging indicators that include revenue and growth. This is where you might also consider market indicators—for instance, stock market performance, currency strength or unemployment numbers—and how they might affect your business. The right processes—including scenario modeling—can help you plug all of those metrics in to see what the future could hold and how well you’re situated to navigate any changes ahead. A Plan For Changing Course Understanding leading and lagging indicators isn’t enough if you don’t have the processes in place to leverage those indicators and create a plan around them. That starts with scenario modeling. While Vena’s benchmark report shows that 40% of organizations aren’t using scenario modeling, it’s a powerful way to plug in the trends you’ve identified to see what your organization’s possible futures might look like in the face of them. By putting those possible futures together with your actual past—the rearview mirror view your lagging indicators offer—you’ll be able to get a full understanding of how future scenarios might affect your organization as a whole and how to make the adjustments you need to thrive. Identifying any necessary plan adjustments or decisions that need to be made will also require agile planning processes such as cash flow management and agile forecasting. It also involves a solid foundation of data—and the power of data-driven storytelling—every step of the way. By incorporating an early warning system and making it a systemic, repeatable and leaned upon way of doing business, you ensure you’re always ready for what’s ahead and also prepared to react quickly to whatever happens. While change may seem unpredictable and impossible to handle, it’s not insurmountable. With an early warning system, it becomes just another part of doing business—and one more thing the finance team is empowered to navigate as you lead your organization today and into tomorrow. Download your free copy of the Vena Q2-2020 Industry Benchmark Report today, and find out how you can turn your data into a direction with Vena agile planning.

  The market shifts. New business goals are established or technologies introduced. A crisis emerges that has everyone trying to keep up. Change in all its forms is an inevitable part of doing business—and empowering change begins with a foundation of people, processes and tools. But to create the best path through and ensure that you continue to thrive, you need to draw on proven change management principles that align the organization and keep it moving forward.  What is Change Management? Change management involves the approach, techniques and tools you use to prepare your organization for change and to guide them through it. Change, after all, is a process in itself—and one that affects every area of business. As such, it needs to be approached thoughtfully, with the right plan in place, to be successful. Why is Change Management Important? Even when it’s done right, change can be intimidating. When done wrong, or too quickly, it can become a source of confusion and fear. Yet the process around change can often be undervalued by the executive team and can lack commitment throughout the organization as a whole. It can be mismanaged, initiated without proper due diligence, brought on too late or activated without proper planning. As part of the finance team, you have the opportunity to set the tone and to build commitment around the process of change, ensuring the right plan is in place and making sure it’s executed properly—then playing a pivotal role at every point.   That’s where change management comes in. The Change Management Process 1. Determine Your Vision  For change to resonate and take hold, there has to first be a solid reason for it—a vision that’s agreed upon by everyone involved and communicated company-wide. Change just for the sake of change will fizzle out before it even gets started—no one’s looking for a make-work project—so a clear purpose is key to driving it through successfully and a strong plan of action integral to ensuring it meets that vision in the end. The best projects are transparent and incremental, treating change like a marathon, not a sprint. Building short and medium-term goals along the way can help ensure success and making sure everyone has access to the same information will keep them all on the same path. But more important than anything is a shared end goal that can act as a finish line for the entire process, aligning everyone towards the same objective and making sure they all have the same expectations going forward. 2. Identify and Listen to Your Stakeholders  Once that vision is in place, the next step is identifying and communicating with stakeholders at all levels of the company (and sometimes beyond). Having the right people on board is key to the success of any change management project and to ensuring that the organization is aligned at every stage. A stakeholder plan will help determine the process of how change will be introduced and who needs to be involved to make it happen—from end users all the way up to the CEO. After all, the success of any new idea is reliant on your organization’s willingness to institute that change. The most successful programs also understand the emotions that change can inspire—getting stakeholder support will start to mitigate fear and confusion and create a culture that celebrates change rather than dreads it. That endeavor continues with the next step of building a team. 3. Build a Team to Facilitate Change  For real change to happen, it has to  be an organization-wide undertaking with champions in every department. That means interacting with individuals at every level of the organization—and not just en masse. Group communications can help make sure the message gets through, but don't take into consideration the individual struggles, insecurities or frustrations that are a common part of change. Facilitating this type of one-on-one communication as well as the listening and collaboration required with it relies on a team. A cross-departmental team will take the cue of the project’s stakeholders and go from there, helping to anticipate problems at all levels and prepare for customer reactions. Bringing in more people earlier in the process so that every part of the organization has a voice can also create a deeper and wider-held commitment to the process underway. 4. Support Change While It’s Happening  A common objective, well laid out vision and the right team are all integral to initiating change. For that change to take hold, though, you need to monitor and support it while it’s underway. This ensures it’s staying on course and helps you identify any resistance, risks or new challenges that come up along the way and do whatever is necessary to mitigate those circumstances as they happen. Making ongoing adjustments while the project is in progress may also be necessary. Those adjustments could be around the technology solutions being used or with the processes in play, to keep things moving forward efficiently and intelligently in ways that fit the business goals. It’s the right combination of processes and technology that will ultimately move an organization forward successfully towards the finish line. And of course, people are integral at this stage too—driving those process and technology decisions.  Identifying and Rationalizing Your Data Data should be a driving factor at every stage of change, fueling your decision making and helping teams identify trends and insights to guide the change ahead. It empowers data-driven storytelling and lets key stakeholders better visualize where the company has been, where it is now and where it’s going. As the main source of trusted data within the company, the finance team is especially pivotal in providing that data, making sense of it and turning it into meaningful insights and strategic direction. Yet no organization’s data is perfect. In fact, it’s often messy and disconnected, hard to get to and difficult to translate into meaningful information. Which is why any change management process is reliant on connecting disparate data sources and making the right data accessible and usable. That means consolidating financial and non-financial data together for a consistent view, eliminating duplicate data or data that’s not usable and mapping the lineage of data points. Doing so builds a data foundation and helps you glean the information necessary to drive the change management process and build towards business growth.  Reaching the Change Management Finish Line With proper buy-in and the right processes, people and technology in place, change can be manageable—whether it emerges from within your company or outside of it. But it requires a smart plan of action, the right data and a shared objective to truly get off the ground and thrive. With all the right components in place, change management can be transformational, putting your business on a new path that will see them through today and forward into the future. Change doesn’t happen overnight. Even with all of the right pieces in place, it takes continual planning, monitoring and communication to be successful. And the finance team can play a critical role in leading the way.    Learn more about how you can quickly get started with best practices for agile planning, or talk to a Vena FP&A expert 1:1 with no obligation to help you plan for today and tomorrow.

Why the right people, process and tools are essential to organizational transformation. Change is part of any business. When navigated well, it can lead to growth and gain. If not, it risks having a less positive effect. But good times or bad, the one truth is this: change isn’t going anywhere.  That’s why having an accepted change management process in place is key to agile business planning—putting organizations at the ready for whatever those changes might be, from shifts in the market and emerging competitors to new innovations or rapid growth. Building a positive environment for change, though, relies on leaders who can take the pulse of an organization and use a dynamic business model to drive growth.  For many companies, this means finance departments are taking on those leadership roles. By providing the insights and data necessary for operational decision making, they can help set goals and ensure the company is staying on track towards them, facilitating quick and intelligent choices along the way. But not all finance teams are up for the task—without a foundation in place to see past the numbers, they have no way of unveiling the insights underneath or leading the way to a successful evolution with agility and confidence. So where does the path to change begin for finance teams? To enable informed and intelligent decision making, they begin by putting the right people, processes and tools in place. The Road to Maturity People, process and tools create the foundation for insight and agility—helping to build a better way for today and pave a path towards tomorrow. And it’s up to the finance team to keep pace, shifting their functional responsibilities from transactional to more strategic. While they’re helping to guide the rest of the company through change, pushing the organization forward, they also can’t forget their own evolution. Company culture, executive buy-in and—most importantly—the maturity of the people, processes and tools in place will all play a part in the finance team’s capacity to do just that. As finance teams mature, they’ll begin to seek out and identify more sophisticated processes and tools to help them better analyze and find insight within the data—putting them in a place to steer organizational change when the need emerges. And if finance has its own house in order when the executive team comes knocking, they’ll be equipped to help other teams begin to identify the people, processes and tools they need to fill the gap and move forward.   For most organizations, the path to finance capability maturity looks something like this: For most companies, that road to maturity begins with the people on your team. The Heart of Everything: People People are central to everything your company does—from the bottom to the top, you wouldn’t get very far without them. They facilitate relationships and build the processes that connect the organization. They choose the technology that helps you work together efficiently and collaboratively. And they provide the intelligence and intuition that will let you look through the data to identify the trends and insights within.  While most finance teams start out more transaction oriented, it’s the people and the knowledge that they bring that, with the right company culture, will see them evolve to a more strategic role. And eventually, when people and business goals align, those teams can become strategic leaders—driving the entire change management process.  As you build change into your company, the right people will: Contribute deep analytical and strategic thinking to build informed insights based on their business knowledge and the data available. Set the vision and map out the process that will drive change through the days ahead. Talk to customers and internal stakeholders to identify upcoming trends and the questions that need to be answered—as well as the best data to facilitate both.  Champion change as it’s happening and revise the plan when necessary. Lead a company-wide team to support the efforts underway. But even the smartest people won’t get far if you have inefficient, unrationalized processes and the wrong technology or tools in place. Setting the Rhythm: Process If people are at the heart of organizational change, process is the rhythm of the organization that drives it.  Informed by your people and company culture, process will dictate how you collaborate. And when a disruption is underway, the right processes will let you pivot quickly to react. For instance, whether you budget and forecast annually, quarterly or monthly will make a difference when it’s time to identify cuts and reduce spend, since it influences the accuracy of your data and how informed your people are. And to improve speed, adopting integrated planning or rolling forecasting models might make sense—but will only bear fruit after undertaking a careful examination of process and putting any necessary changes in action to make them work.  And just like people rely on processes to work efficiently and effectively, those processes can fall apart when people aren’t on board to support and champion them—especially at the highest executive levels. Teams and the organizations around them need to seek out the value each process offers and the outlook it brings. As that internal investment evolves, they can move from more financially focused processes with periodic cycles, towards processes that truly enable proactive decision making at every turn. In times of change, best-in-class processes can: Fuel decision making and identify the changes that need to be made.  Provide near-term, rolling and long-term outlooks for different viewpoints into future business health. Drive business accountability and transparency. Determine that the right targets and measurements are in place. Identify the best actions and investments at every step. Together, process and people provide the base for all change. Even without the most sophisticated software, they’ll help finance departments create an agile environment to improve the decision making ahead. But the right tools will facilitate that journey and put new efficiencies and capabilities in place. The Final Piece: Tools   The last piece of the puzzle is the technology you choose to use to empower your people and enable your processes. Technology keeps processes collaborative and timely and ensures people stay informed, involved and empowered to act. Having technology tools in place can facilitate organizational growth and the change management process, but it’s just as critical that the tools you use fit your company culture. Technology bells and whistles go nowhere if people don’t know how to use them or if they don’t complement or can’t evolve with the processes you have in place.  Your tools, then, evolve as you do—from those that facilitate individual productivity to those configured for processes that are more repeatable and data intense. And the deeper you are in your maturity as a finance function, the more sophisticated tools you’ll need to help you meet your goals. As your organization matures, the right tools will help teams: Connect disparate types of data across financial and non-financial sources. Visualize data in ways that facilitate communication and collaboration.  Offer a real-time view of the changes underway and the most critical KPIs. Align the company’s mission timeline and cash availability. Identify, integrate and automate drivers into business plans. Align KPIs to strategy and identify the possibilities available to drive better decision making. Through all of that, your team will be able to pivot your business model, as needed, to facilitate smarter decision making and navigate change.  But while change might be inevitable, it’s also incremental. Just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, your finance team won’t reach full maturity overnight. Your people, processes and tools will continue to mature in order to support the organization—until the finance team is leading the way to positive growth and gain.  Learn more about how you can quickly get started with best practices for agile planning, or talk to a Vena FP&A expert 1:1 with no obligation to help you plan for today and tomorrow.

If a literary author sees the value in using Excel to keep track of more than 150 characters, just imagine what CFOs and their teams could do. The story of how a U.S. president coped with the sudden death of his son, Lincoln On The Bardo may not be the kind of escapist reading that CFOs and other business leaders would turn to in their downtime. You don’t have to love George Saunders’ novel, however, to appreciate the process he took to create it. Based on true events in the life of the late Abraham Lincoln, Saunders’ book has been receiving major accolades for its engaging storyline and believable characters. Most of us would probably find creating this kind of serious literature a little intimidating — which makes it a comfort to know he turned to the finance professionals’ most valuable tools when he wrote it:  Of the 166 different voices in the book (he knows the exact number; “I made a spreadsheet”), not all are fictional. “I thought, to do ghosts all the time was not going to work,” Saunders remembered. “It’s almost like there’s too much control in the writer’s hand, since the ghosts can do anything.” In a certain way, there are actually some similarities between the way an author like Saunders works and how performance management software is changing the way companies operate. The work of any novelist is grounded in some kind of essential, single version of the truth. Exactly how factual and well-researched that truth is depends on the writer, of course. An even bigger portion of the novelist’s task is to imagine possibilities and let them play out on the page. The Task For CFOs Now think about the way companies use data — the kind of information that was once locked in spreadsheets but can now take on a new life by (for example) connecting them to a central database and automating the data collection process. The task for the CFO (and his or her team) is to then imagine possibilities based on what the data tells them and let them play out on the page. Or in the board meeting. In both cases, spreadsheets are a highly effective way to organize information so that the creative, imaginative work can happen more readily. This is where you and your team should be spending your time – not copying and pasting numbers from cell to cell. A recent article on Adweek, for instance, explored how ad agencies are starting to make use of artificial intelligence (AI). One of those interviews suggested that job security will depend on embracing machine learning and leaving the past behind. “If your job is really to move numbers around a spreadsheet and optimizing it based on what’s performing, the computer is going to be way better than you and faster,” the article said. Too often we forget or overlook that spreadsheets are not just places to move numbers around but to move knowledge forward. Excel may always be more of a mainstay among enterprise finance departments than novelists, but there’s no end to the novel ways you can use them to your advantage. The post A Novel Use of Excel Spreadsheets to Inspire Finance Departments appeared first on Blog | Vena Voice | Vena Solutions.