Recent TRG blog posts

Planning and budgeting provides valuable insights for managing risk, boosting corporate performance and shareholder value and making strategic decisions. Using a business model as the basis of the planning process enables the development of: charts of accounts; time divided by years/quarters/months; version control to store actuals/budgets/forecasts and other important data segments, which can be used to create the plans. Organisations should look for planning solutions capable of delivering flexible business models that are mapped to their unique business requirements.

Blog Topics: Planning and Budgeting

Jack Welch, former Chairman at GE once said: “The budgeting process…sucks the energy, time, fun, and big dream out of an organization”. Yes, everyone hates it! If there is an effective way to do it without trying too hard will you take its advantages to grow? What you need is just a good planning and budgeting process and the right technology!

Blog Topics: Planning and Budgeting, CFOs, Financial consolidation, planning and reporting, Financial Accounting Management Software

Recent research by Anaplan, an expert on modelling and planning finance, sales and operations platforms, states that currently, Asia Pacific’s CFOs are still experiencing difficulties with spreadsheet usages in financial planning and budgeting. In addition, there was a relatively low satisfaction level with the accuracy, timeliness and ease of Excel use for planning and budgeting.

Read more: A complete guide to financial consolidation

Blog Topics: Planning and Budgeting, CFOs, Financial consolidation, planning and reporting

Blog Topics: Planning and Budgeting, CFOs, Financial Accounting Management Software

Blog Topics: Planning and Budgeting, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Financial Accounting Management Software

In the last post, we outlined the alarming issue of a strategy gap in businesses nowadays and how it can be undesirably widened by failures in strategic planning and budgeting.  To gain a competitive advantage and increase business resilience, companies need to bridge this gap between strategy and execution, the task that requires serious dedication from everyone in an organisation. There are four factors of an effective strategy and execution alignment, from conveying what corporate goals really mean to identifying how they should be achieved.

Blog Topics: Planning and Budgeting, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)

It is hard enough to come up with an effective corporate strategy. It is even harder to execute that strategy effectively to achieve desirable outcomes. A 2009 study on employees found that 70% of them were confused about what they needed to do to support their company’s strategy. The same study, published in Fake Work by Brent D. Peterson & Gaylan Nielson, Simon Schuste, “half of all the work people did had nothing to do with their company’s strategy”. For the last dose of alarm, 73% of surveyed workers did not think their company’s goals are translated into specific executable work.

Blog Topics: Planning and Budgeting, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)

“It’s an increasingly complex world” (Accenture, 2012)

Today, economic turmoil and volatility are dominant and the roles of CFOs and senior finance managers are changing. Thus, it’s critical that CFOs are able to:

Blog Topics: Planning and Budgeting, CFOs, Financial consolidation, planning and reporting, Financial Accounting Management Software

In our view, companies are best served when they take an integrated approach to build an IFRS framework. Toward that end, they need a fully integrated solution ideal for supporting the IFRS adoption. A key element is the ability of enterprise applications to work in conjunction with financial management ones to meet a wide range of accounting requirements and processes mandated by the International Financial Reporting Standards. 

Blog Topics: Planning and Budgeting, Financial consolidation, planning and reporting, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)

Adopting IFRS alongside VAS requires technical, strategic, and operational changes. There also will be an unavoidable impact on information technology (IT) systems, as companies change the way they manage and report on numerous business activities. Hence, companies should employ a methodical approach when building the IFRS framework.

Blog Topics: Planning and Budgeting, Financial consolidation, planning and reporting, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)