The recent departure of Walgreen’s CFO due to a large forecasting variance error, is a drastic reminder to all of us who have dedicated their careers to financial transformation, of the intense criticality of mastering the entire cycle of planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting.
15 years ago when I started consulting with finance and accounting departments, it was the norm to manage the business with spreadsheets. What may surprise some is that nearly 90% of companies according to recent reports, are still using spreadsheets and outdated technology, exposing them to unnecessary risk.
There has never been a better time to break free from reliance on spreadsheets and other outdated processes by elevating budgeting & forecasting procedures to the Cloud. World-class budgeting and forecasting solutions can be deployed in record time without hardware costs or reliance on IT support.
The ability to measure financial performance is more relevant now than ever before as companies try to become more competitive and more profitable. Finance teams see significant value moving to the cloud by avoiding significant upfront costs for software and hardware and reaping the benefits of a quick start rapid deployment of a budgeting & forecasting application. A recent Oracle survey indicated that 70% of customers were motivated to avoid the large upfront investment and 62% favored the ability to get up and running quickly.*
I’ll be sharing my perspectives on the modernization of budgeting, forecasting and planning on an upcoming webinar I am hosting and hope you can join me. https://go.pardot.com/webmail/9462/296048359/64aade0568bc6ecbdbb0e59b2cf3e676
If you are still on spreadsheets, I’d love to hear from you on what’s stopping you. I’d like to tackle that challenge in a future blog post.
