Sometimes, when you’ve spent months on your planning, budgeting and forecasting and corporate performance management, only to have a week-long break and start at it once again, canning Excel altogether and looking for something better often seems like a fruitful endeavour. After all, there has to be something better out…

In most organizations the IT department is understandably on the hook resolving all technology issues, typically including corporate software-related implementation and maintenance. That’s fair – after all, that is what they are mandated and trained to do. Technology, for good reason, will likely always remain the purview of IT experts,…

With constant pressure at the executive level to drive Sales and top-line revenue in increasingly competitive markets, the CFO is often put into the difficult position of reconciling the seemingly conflicting priorities of revenue vs. margins. In an effort to better understand and put into perspective top CFO priorities from…

As quarter- or year-end looms, we start hearing about the need to tie up our budgets and forecasts. And hear about them again.  And again!  We are all fully aware of how critical these numbers are for intelligent decision making, both strategically and for day-to-day operations. On the flip side,…

Are you making decisions today based on last week’s information? Think about all of the data that comes to you: sales and revenue forecasting, compensation and CapEx planning, project, expense and plant profitability budgeting. If your company uses Excel, most of this data will come to you in Excel spreadsheets,…

The issue is almost universal: all (or at least most) of your employees are using spreadsheets for budgeting. Different departments have their own variations, with unique calculations. When this goes up to the manager level, how many different versions do these managers have to work with? When it comes time…

As a CFO, much of your thinking and decision making is data-driven. The numbers, the statistics, the data – these are the things that influence and inspire your thought processing. Of course that makes sense – at the core of every business, the numbers are what matter. When it comes…

Throughout the decades, organizations have changed the way they do business. At certain points, decentralized operations were popular. At others, centralized operations were seen as the better choice. Today, companies use both methods to manage their operations, from procurement to budgeting. While decentralized budgeting can work well for certain companies,…

Unless you’ve got a crystal ball, revenue forecasting is always going to be an imperfect science. You’re predicting the future, after all. No matter how well you know your business and industry, there are things you won’t be able to foresee – things that can throw off your prediction entirely….

For the past several years, businesses of all types have been deciding to either supplement or replace their annual budgets with rolling forecasts. There are a number of reasons for this. For one, rolling forecasts can offer greater accuracy than an annual budget, which is often out of date within…