Bringing Collaboration into Your Financial Planning Process

Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) is the process of planning, analyzing, collaborating and reporting on the organization’s financial strategy. I want to specifically focus on the collaboration piece in this blog.

“Collaboration” – the simple yet powerful act of working with others on a task or activity to achieve shared goals. Let’s take the example of Ballet, almost always, by nature is a collaborative art form. Ballet needs music, dancers costumes, a venue, lighting, etc. One could always do a solo performance but the beauty and power of ballet really comes out when individuals and art collaborate and produce the show.

Real time Collaboration can dramatically alter the performance of an FP&A system, according to a recent Aberdeen Report. Collaboration in Financial Planning and Analysis includes consolidating inputs from multiple sources, analyzing the data, and communicating results that are understood and respected by decision makers. In the past, while users understood the importance of collaboration, they did not have the right tools and technologies to be effective in real time and context of a specific plan or report being analyzed. E-mail and messenger were the tools of the choice, which were not integrated with their planning system. Now the game has changed with a solution featuring a collaboration engine embedded in the planning system.

Benefits of this embedded collaboration are simply amazing. An FP&A user can now:

• Collaborate with their colleagues and stakeholders in real time from the same application where they are planning and analyzing
• Optimize the decision process by providing in-context information to the decision makers
• Share reports, tasks, and other related information with key stakeholders
• Build an effective social community to contribute to the FP&A Process

Organizations are considering social collaboration functionality as a key part of their cloud technology.

For more information read the Aberdeen Report, “Next Generation of Cloud FP&A: Simple Collaborative and Real-Time” and learn how to collaborate on your plans like never before.