Pressures in corporate financial planning today

Since the global economic meltdown, businesses have been forced to be more cautious in their decision making to ensure growth amid uncertainty. Processes such as planning and budgeting, more than ever, need to be fine-tuned and have a degree of flexibility to keep up with change.

In fact, adapting to this precarious global situation has become the top pressure faced by businesses. Another pressure that has emerged is the need to align strategy and/or corporate goals with planning and budgeting. Top-performing companies are 55% more likely to use strategy to drive the budget, while those lower down the league have budget-constraint strategies that weaken the link between these processes and strategic goals.

Other pressures are corporate mandates urging cost control, low accuracy of the budget that negatively affects corporate performance and long, resource-extensive processes. Though most of these pressures have actually decreased over the years, a dynamic approach towards financial planning is still called for. This is enabled through five key elements: process, organisation, technology, knowledge management and performance management.

With a renewed focus on strategic goals and corporate performance, organisations hoping to achieve Best-in-class status must deploy tools that provide visibility and flexibility to balance caution and driving growth and create a competitive advantage as the market changes.

Check out the whitepaper “How Best-in-Class Plan, Budget and Forecast in Today’s Dynamic World”.