When it comes to budgeting, where does your organization stand? Do you start at the top or build it from the bottom up?   While there are plenty of ways to go about your corporate budget, most fall under two categories, taking either a top-down or a bottom-up approach. The process you choose can affect your business in different ways—and each comes with its own pros and cons. To make the right decision for your organization and to determine which will best enable you to execute on your financial operating plan, consider both models in turn. Top-down vs. bottom-up budgeting Top-down budgeting: advantages and disadvantages Bottom-up budgeting: advantages and disadvantages What’s right for your business? Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Budgeting While the end goal may be the same—a company-wide budget—both top-down and bottom-up budgeting approaches have different starting points and get to the finish line using distinctly unique routes. So what are the fundamental differences between them? Top-Down Budgeting Top-down budgeting starts with senior management. It’s up to them to create a budget for the entire company, allocating resources to each department according to company-wide objectives and organizational targets for the year ahead. Past performance and current market conditions are taken into consideration, while the previous year’s budget and historical performance help determine which departments should get what—with an eye on how departments contributed to past goals. Departments build their own budgets from there, based on the resources they've been allocated. Often, though, some funds will be set aside at the corporate level, allowing for final shuffles or extra calls for resources if departments feel they don’t have what they need to meet their individual goals. Top-down budgeting, in other words, is a form of “budget allocation.” It starts with a set amount and allocates funding and resources accordingly across departments, leaving it to them to develop new plans or reduce their existing ones based on the resources they’ve been allotted. Bottom-Up Budgeting Bottom-up budgeting, meanwhile, begins exactly where you’d expect: the bottom. That is, departments prepare budgets for their teams based on what they need for the next year: the initiatives they want to run, the programs they already have in place and the hires they want to make. To ease the process, company-wide objectives and expectations are often shared with departments first, to give them organizational-wide visibility as they make their plan and provide protection against siloed requests. Departments present their budgets for approval, and the finance team or budget committee goes through each from there, to approve or disapprove line items according to those larger organizational objectives. A company-wide budget emerges from that work. One example of a bottom-up budgeting approach is zero-based budgeting, which starts with a clean slate every time in order to justify and prioritize every departmental expenditure. Top-Down Budgeting: Advantages and Disadvantages Neither approach is inherently better than the other—and certain types of corporate budgeting, such as driver-based budgeting, will work with either model. The key is to understand how your own organization works and to make your budgeting process a natural extension of it. It’s also critical to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each model before choosing one. A top-down budgeting process, for example, empowers you to allocate resources based on company strategy and an overall picture of organizational performance and goals. As with any type of top-down management style, though, aligning your departmental teams behind the results may be more difficult. Advantages of Top-Down Budgeting Executive buy-in is built in. Since management is involved early on, you know that your budget will be aligned with their viewpoint and goals—and that it will reflect the future growth plans and strategic direction of your business as a whole. And by capping departmental budgets based on overall goals, you make departments more accountable to those objectives. It can be faster. A top-down budgeting approach is generally faster than a bottom-up method—and at the same time can create organizational transparency into business-wide spending. Disadvantages of Top-Down Budgeting It can be more difficult to get departmental buy-in. Given that individual departments aren’t involved in the budgeting process, they may not be motivated to see it succeed. Intra-departmental strife may also result if one department feels their goals are being deprioritized in favor of another department’s objectives. It can create a “if you don’t spend it, you lose it” environment. As a finance team what you see as an attempt to be efficient with your spending, departments may perceive as a threat to future resources. Which means they may feel the need to spend what they have even if they don’t need it to meet their goals—or risk having their next budget cut. Bottom-Up Budgeting: Advantages and Disadvantages A bottom-up process ensures that your budget contemplates the needs of every department so that they have the resources they require to achieve their goals and put your organization ahead on its larger strategic objectives. It’s generally a slower process for your finance team, though, as you incorporate all of the departmental requests into a cohesive overall plan. Advantages of Bottom-Up Budgeting It’s often more efficient. Departmental teams, in general, have a closer eye on the resources they need to accomplish their goals—which means bottom-up budgeting is generally based on a more efficient and often more accurate assessment of where resources need to be allocated to get results.. It’s more aligned with departmental needs. Since the executive team doesn’t always have deep visibility into the individual programs or initiatives each department is planning, they may not know how or where to allocate resources to get the best results. Departments do, though. And since departments—and their managers—are ultimately the masterminds of their own budgets in a bottom-up approach, they’re also more likely to rally behind the overall results. Disadvantages of Bottom-Up Budgeting It can lead to over-budgeting. Since every department wants to truly ensure they have the resources they need to meet all of their goals, managers will often pad their requests to give themselves wiggle room for changes—something that can throw off the entire organizational budget if you don’t keep an eye out. It can take longer to create (unless aided by the right technology). Bottom-up budgeting starts with a series of smaller budgets that are then combined together into something more cohesive for the entire organization. Making those smaller budgets work together—and going through each line item to incorporate necessary changes to fit company objectives overall—can take both time and resources to achieve. It’s also something a tool like Excel wasn’t traditionally designed for so it can require a more sophisticated technology to make it work. What’s Right for Your Business? Choosing which approach is best for your business means understanding the psychology of how your organization operates. Do teams work better when ideas are their own, or do they prefer your leadership to come to them with the best plan of action? And how is your organization at creating transparency in their goals and strategies so that you can pivot and reallocate resources faster? In some cases, you may not even opt for one model or the other, instead approaching your budget from both directions as a way of ensuring you have visibility into both departmental and organizational goals or to meet specific objectives. You may introduce a longer-term plan that takes a more top-down approach, for instance, then implement either a rolling or traditional plan for the nearer term using a bottom-up method. Or some years, you may choose to go into more detail on the cost structures of your goods or services—building a bottom-up budget from there. Other years, you may want to take the opposite approach. After all, in the end, the point of both top-down and bottom-up budgeting approaches is the same: to make sure resources are allocated intelligently and in a way that gives everyone what they need to build towards your overall business strategy and goals. If everyone has an eye on that, either model is bound to be successful. Find out how Vena can help you build a better budget.

Agility is crucial to any organization. It defines how your team works together—and how quickly it adapts. But organizational agility depends on the strategic and operational business processes used by your company. With the right agile processes in place, your team will be better equipped to keep up with market changes and to empower your organization to thrive. Rolling forecasting is one such process—bringing agility to your budgeting and forecasting and deepening your visibility ahead. By extending your budget past a fixed timeframe, it allows you to continue to update across fiscal years. And as with any forecasting process, it enables you to keep evaluating resources and project allocations so that you can make changes that tie your budget to ongoing performance, allowing you to project and allocate resources to keep up with any changes underway. A lot of finance teams opt for rolling forecasts over a traditional static budgeting or forecasting approach. To decide if it’s right for you, consider the following: What is a rolling forecast? Rolling forecasts vs. static budgets 4 benefits of rolling forecasts The challenges of introducing rolling forecasts Rolling forecast best practices What Is a Rolling Forecast? Updated at set periods—whether it be quarterly, monthly or even weekly—rolling forecasts do exactly what they say: they roll, taking a rolling view in arrears and into the future across revenue, expenses, cash metrics and more. By adding and dropping a week, month or quarter every cycle, a 12-month rolling forecast—or some other variation—allows you to maintain visibility ahead, even well past the traditional static budgeting timeframe of a fiscal year. It lets you look 13 weeks, 12 months, four quarters or 18 months into the future at all times—or whatever makes the most sense based on the business process or planning outcome to which it's being applied. Rolling Forecasts vs. Static Budgets While rolling forecasts are rising in popularity, traditional static budgets are still a pretty common choice among finance teams—and a fixed budget with a fixed timeframe and fixed targets is still going to be the best decision for some organizations. In fact, businesses that are low growth or in a less disruptive space may find that the more traditional approach is all they really need. But in high-growth companies or large organizations with a lot of moving parts—or amidst evolving market or industry changes—traditional budgets and intra-year forecasts may not be enough to keep up. Rolling forecasts fill that gap. By helping to maintain visibility into recent performance while better projecting future needs, they allow those quick-moving companies to remain agile to new trends and requirements while continuing to move the planning horizon forward. Of course, it’s not actually an either/or approach. You can opt to implement both static budgets and rolling forecasts—or you might even be required to have both so that you can offer a full view of company performance to your board, investors or stakeholders. In those cases, rolling forecasts become an extension of your annual budgeting process. You can choose to introduce them as a process of review at regular intervals to keep up with current performance and changing market conditions or apply them only to certain areas, such as revenue or cash planning, with a more traditional approach used elsewhere. 4 Benefits of Rolling Forecasts Without having to wait a full year to revisit your budget, rolling forecasts let you plan for both the short and long term—always with a view into the future, several months ahead. In doing so, they can help you better pivot to make sure you’re getting the best results at every step. Consider the benefits of rolling forecasts: 1. They help you stay ahead. Instead of basing your budget primarily on past results—as is the case with traditional budgets—rolling forecasts let you consider current operational drivers, such as customer satisfaction, market share and category growth, to stay ahead of market and business changes. 2. They improve accuracy. A static budget risks becoming out of date within months—or even days if the market unexpectedly changes. But a rolling forecast gives you a constant outlook, allowing you to adjust quickly so that you have the right resources in place to keep up. 3. They mitigate risk. By maintaining a consistent horizon for your forward-looking outlook forecast, you’ll be better positioned to keep your plan aligned to current performance, recognize risks to your business and make appropriate course corrections. 4. They let you make better decisions. With a more up-to-date eye on your forecast, you’ll also have a better understanding of when to take risks—for example, putting resources into a new growth initiative—or when staying the course is a better game plan. Also, areas of the business that work on a longer time horizon will no longer do so in a vacuum—becoming part of the bigger holistic picture instead. The Challenges of Introducing Rolling Forecasts While the benefits are many, there are also some potential obstacles that can get in the way of implementing rolling forecasts. Keep these in mind if you're considering introducing rolling forecasts into your business: 1. They can require added investments—both in time and money. To be successful, rolling forecasts may require technology and training investments, as well as extra time from your team to put the best processes in place and to keep them running smoothly. Be prepared to justify the extra expenditures. 2. Success is dependent on company culture. For rolling forecasting to work, you need your senior managers to not only support it, but also to update their own forecasts on a rolling basis—which means you’re adding to their already busy workload. But managers can benefit from the process as well—funding requests don’t need to be restricted to just once a year, for instance. Helping them understand that can get them on board. 3. They’re dependent on clean data. You need a constant flow of performance data to inform your rolling forecasts. That data allows you to compare actuals to forecasts and ensure your plans are on track. It’s no surprise, then, that companies can let a lack of clean, actionable data get in the way of introducing rolling forecasting. Waiting for the data to be perfect, though, isn’t the answer either. Rolling Forecast Best Practices What does it take for a rolling forecast process to be successful? Consider six best practices: 1. Always keep your business-wide objectives in mind Fully aligning your rolling forecast with your company strategy—and iterating your forecast as those goals and plans change—will help you ensure the right resources are available to meet your organization’s ongoing goals at any given time. Leverage a three-year or similar outlook as a guide stick until it’s time for your next annual strategic plan. This gives you the flexibility to build rolling plans that align to your strategy, whether those strategies are updated annually or more often. 2. Choose the best timeframe for your business Whether you choose to forecast quarterly, monthly or weekly, the timeframe should match the rate at which your company is evaluating progress—as well as the pace of the industry around you. 3. Figure out how granular you want to get Just as important as the timeframe you choose is deciding how deep you want to get into your forecasting each time. It’s best to focus your deeper analysis on the drivers that promise to most impact your strategic goals and ongoing performance. 4. Choose the right technology The right tool will help you ensure your rolling forecast has the inputs it needs to be useful across your business strategy and KPIs. It will also ensure that you have buy-in early on longer-term commitments around cash management, inventory management and new hires. Leveraging technology makes rolling your plan a simple lift and empowers your people to run an efficient and effective rolling forecast process. 5. Incorporate the best data available While it’s certainly important to start with a solid data infrastructure, it’s also crucial that you not let the status of your data stop you from getting off the ground. Leverage areas where your data is clean, then use the forecasting process to build transparency and accountability, resulting in your data becoming even cleaner over time. 6. Measure along the way Use dashboards and visualizations to track execution against your rolling forecast so that you can see how it keeps up with ongoing performance. In doing so, you’ll be able to make any necessary iterations along the way—and ensure your progress stays transparent across your business. Once you’ve established a new normal, rolling forecasts can give you exactly the agility and insight you need to help your business thrive—and ensure you’re ready for whatever is ahead. Learn how Vena can help empower your rolling forecasts.

In today’s ever-changing business environment, there’s no time to guess what’s right for your business. Knowledge is power and that’s why having access to the right information is critical for faster, data-driven decision making across your organization. But according to survey results published in the recent 2020 Vena Industry Benchmark Report, it seems a majority of businesses are still not providing stakeholders with key data at their fingertips in order to make better business decisions for today and tomorrow. When 350 global business leaders from a variety of industries were surveyed for the report and asked about investments made in data and data-driven decisions, 55% had not purchased, nor were actively using a business intelligence (BI) tool. This means most finance professionals are still spending a lot of time gathering data and organizing it rather than focusing on the stories behind the numbers to make more informed decisions and help navigate businesses through change. What Is a Business Intelligence Tool? A business intelligence tool, as the name implies, is a tool that helps you analyze your data so you can make smarter business decisions. It’s like converting your data into a constant business review—discovering your company’s successes, setbacks and areas for improvement—so your team can make smarter and faster decisions that benefit the overall organization. Consider BI the essential tool to have in your finance team’s toolbox so they can spend less time looking for the data they need and spending all that extra time gained being the data analyst experts you need them to be for your business. Benefits of Business Intelligence Tools for Finance Professionals When your business is not able to adapt to rapidly evolving market conditions fast enough, there’s a lot at stake for your company. But without quick access to relevant data across your company in one centralized location, your team is left making business decisions on guesswork rather than on what’s best for your organization, putting your overall business at risk. An easy-to-use BI tool will help automate your budgeting, planning and forecasting processes and integrate your data into a single source of truth. It will also support descriptive and predictive data analytics within your organization, eliminate the guesswork in decision making and minimize potential risks for your business. Once your team is equipped with accurate and up-to-date information, they’ll be inspired to dive deeper into the numbers, identify business trends and turn operational data into real-time, company-wide insights that are actionable and that will help move the business forward. BI capabilities will also give your company a competitive advantage, enabling your team to create at-a-glance, pixel-perfect dashboards and data visualizations in minutes to give your data more meaning. When you can easily tell your financial reporting story using engaging, interactive visuals, your team will be able to collaborate on—and further share insights that were garnered from ad hoc analysis and reporting—and take appropriate action in decision making. With all this data at hand and with a clearer understanding of what’s working and what’s not in your business, you and your team can spend more time doing what you do best—charting your company’s journey to growth. A BI solution will help you and your business stakeholders determine the best routes moving forward. Learn how Vena can help you accelerate your budgeting and forecasting processes. Download Vena’s 2020 Industry Benchmark Report 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.

Going beyond the numbers to shape a powerful narrative with your data is an important skill for finance leaders to master.   If you start thinking about the world’s best storytellers, you’ll probably lean towards the Shakespeares, Spielbergs and Springsteens of the world. But what about Agile CFOs? They’re pretty savvy storytellers too. When it comes to running a business, strategic decisions are always driven by data. And as every organization’s data analytics maestro, it’s the CFO’s job to uncover the story behind that data. Agile CFOs, though, take this a few steps further: They’re constantly challenging business plans, leading through change with confidence, fostering company-wide teamwork and telling the story beyond the bottom line. Agile CFOs enable timely, data-driven business planning with the right tools for the job. They’re the driving force behind the company’s plan to grow. Looking for more Agile CFO insights? Check out PlanToGrow.com and watch the free, on-demand talk, “7 Principles of the Agile CFO.” Consolidating your financials and reporting the numbers is one thing, but shaping a powerful narrative to drive informed decision making across the business is another. Agile CFOs don’t just deliver the what, they also deliver the why behind every number and every business plan. It’s called data storytelling—and it’s a skill every finance leader should practice. In this blog post, you will learn: What data storytelling in finance looks like Why data storytelling is important for finance leaders How to master data storytelling for finance-led business planning What Is Data Storytelling? Data storytelling is a creative way of consolidating, analyzing and presenting important data in a format that’s easy to understand. In finance, data storytelling complements FP&A processes, such as budgeting, forecasting and financial reporting, by providing legitimate context and reasoning behind the reported figures. It helps CFOs turn numbers into narratives with input from every arm of the company, ultimately resulting in a more strategic, reliable and well-informed business planning process. Why Is Data Storytelling So Important? Data storytelling is crucial because it helps you make a business case for financial decisions. It also allows you to contextualize and justify financial results. When a company needs to take a necessary action, data storytelling is how Agile CFOs identify, plan for and communicate the path forward to the rest of the company. Let’s say, for example, that you need to implement a hiring freeze in a recession or make a substantial investment in product development to compete with larger competitors. Data storytelling allows you to clearly communicate the projected result of that decision—both financial and non-financial—and align stakeholders across the company on business objectives moving forward. Another example could be if your business overspent on sales and marketing. Data storytelling is how you articulate: Were our quotas too low? Is our advertising budget too high? What really happened here and how can we fix it? Data storytelling puts it all into perspective and that’s why it’s so important for successful finance-led business planning. Top 3 Data Storytelling Best Practices With business conditions evolving as rapidly as they are these days, planning for the future of your company means having to make a lot of quick decisions. Now more than ever, you need to know how the choices you make today will influence the bottom line tomorrow. It makes insightful data storytelling an even bigger priority, which is why Agile CFOs use integrated planning tools to do it well. Make sure you follow these three best practices so you can master data storytelling at your organization: 1. Visualize Your Data With Business Intelligence Dashboards Many people are visual learners by nature and that’s why dashboards are such an essential aspect of data storytelling. When configured properly, dashboards can be used to visualize a range of metrics and KPIs from across your business. They can include graphs, charts and scorecards that bring your financial and non-financial data to life. Given how simple they typically are to read, dashboards make it easy to align your numbers with compelling narratives. A recent survey from BPM Partners suggests they’re growing in popularity too, and for good reason. Well-built dashboards allow you to: Measure real-time performance trends and identify opportunities for improvement Benchmark important KPIs and track results against those benchmarks over time Identify relationships between metrics and report what those mean for your business Provide key stakeholders with a visual guide to their reported numbers Ensure transparency, accountability and engagement across the organization by showing employees how their efforts are moving the needle Every company’s business intelligence strategy is different, and there’s no one right or wrong way to set up your dashboards. It all depends on the story you’re trying to tell, so make sure you build the dashboards you need to tell that story effectively. Check out this dashboarding guide to learn more about how to tell powerful stories with your numbers and guide your business forward with confidence. 2. Eliminate Data Silos So You Can Tell the Whole Story Data storytelling in finance is about more than just revenue and profit margins. In order to tell a complete story with your numbers and convey their impact on the entire business, you need to weave cross-functional operations data into the narratives you build as well. Consider this example: Your company is preparing to launch a new flagship product offering. You’re adjusting your budgets and forecasts and planning for some additional revenue. In addition to the bottom-line projections, the story you tell in your management reporting or your board meeting should answer the following questions: How will this affect headcount? Will we need to hire more staff to accommodate higher revenue targets? If the product launch doesn’t generate as much interest as we expect it to, do we still have enough active deals in our sales pipeline to meet our goals? Is our infrastructure equipped for a more rigorous production schedule? Will we need to invest in a new facility? The answers to those questions shape the narrative you’re trying to develop here, but the specific data you need might not be easily accessible. If critical data is siloed in multiple disparate source systems—such as your ERP/GL, CRM, HRIS and fixed asset tracking system—you’ll have to hunt down numbers manually which is tedious and prone to error. It makes agile, data-driven storytelling a lot more difficult to do. That’s where integrated planning tools come in. With one centralized platform that connects your existing data sources, you can eliminate data silos and build a single source of truth your entire company can trust. Not only will you save time, but your cross-functional stakeholders will also find it easier to participate in the strategic planning process—ultimately resulting in more reliable business narratives that tell the entire story. Discover how to integrate your data sources for faster, smarter and more efficient data storytelling from a single source of truth. 3. Know Your Audience & Inspire Them To Take Action “People hear statistics, but they feel stories.” Those are some wise words from Brent Dykes, a frequent Forbes contributor and author of Effective Data Storytelling. The statement addresses exactly why data storytelling is so powerful: It evokes emotion, inspires action and drives positive outcomes for your business. It’s about rallying your colleagues and planning as a team after drawing them in with a story. After all, people tend to perform better if they know their role in your company’s narrative and can feel the impact of their contributions. That’s why you need to shape stories that appeal to the audience you’re trying to engage. Not everybody is motivated by numbers alone, and Agile CFOs understand this better than anyone. Let’s say, for example, that you’re reporting on a major loss that wasn’t in your quarterly plan. You can’t just send around the same spreadsheet and simply say, “there are the results.” If you want to inspire action, you’ll have to tailor the story purposefully so every department understands how to respond. Sales leaders in this case might need a forecast update so they can realign targets with their team. Operations teams might want a detailed breakdown of transactional data to ensure that nothing was overlooked. Investors will want to know if your three-year plan is affected, and HR leaders will want a heads up if they need to prepare for layoffs. Now, instead of just reporting the numbers, you’re shaping an actionable narrative driven by legitimate financial data. And like any good story, it’s all about the delivery—you need to be clear, assertive and personable so your message doesn’t get lost in the fold. As you continue to tell stories with your data and plan for today and tomorrow, ask yourself: What am I trying to achieve with this narrative? What action do I want to drive? How can I tell this story in an empathetic way that resonates with my stakeholders? What’s important to my audience and how does this story address that? By answering those questions daily and following the best practices above, you’ll master data storytelling and be able to better support agile, finance-led business planning. And with the right tools at your disposal, including dashboards and integrated planning solutions, uncovering the narrative behind your numbers will be a breeze. Data-driven storytelling will grow into a standard process for your finance team as you continue to navigate change and plan for the future of your business. Learn more about how you can quickly get started with data storytelling, or talk to a Vena FP&A expert 1:1 to help you plan for today and tomorrow.

  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.

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.