The speed of doing business continues to increase. When it feels like there’s a lead foot on the accelerator, CFOs feel the pressure to respond quickly to emerging opportunities and risks, which puts the spotlight on budgeting and forecasting. And forecasting is already a stress point, with FTI Consulting citing that 84 percent of CFOs report their business needs to improve forecasting accuracy. 

To combat the need to continually optimize costs, allocate capital, and fine-tune workforce dynamics, CFOs are turning to rolling forecasts and running scenario plans more frequently. However, they’re often faced too with limited skillsets in their own teams of FP&A professionals, and even bigger than that, a lack of integrated reporting and planning. 

Gone are the days when a static, spreadsheet-based reporting template could do the job across the organization. Businesses now need the ability to continuously adjust and hone. Which means it’s not about building the perfect plan that you can stick to all year. It’s actually about the ability to refine and reforecast at a moment’s notice to keep the business on track. 

The Challenges of Traditional Budgeting and Forecasting

The move to more agile practices is a must if an organization is going to compete in an increasingly uncertain and complex environment. In these spaces, traditional budgeting and forecasting methods just simply fall short. 

Static Plans
Using traditional budgeting means you’re basing the numbers in your spreadsheet on fixed assumptions. When (not if) the market condition changes or an unforeseen event occurs, it’s next to impossible to respond with the current budget.

Time-Consuming
Accurate budgets require extensive data, analysis, and coordination across departments. Doing this with manual, static spreadsheets is not only time-consuming, but eats into resources as well, pulling time and energy from other strategic activities and ultimately stalling your overall efficiency.

Misalignment with Business Strategy
If your budgeting and strategic planning are disconnected, your budget may not align with the big-picture business objective. That misalignment can mean resources are put to the wrong places, which hamstrings the business’ chance of achieving its goals.

Minimal Communication and Collaboration
Are each department’s planning processes happening in a silo? Then you run the risk of suboptimal decision-making, as no department has the ability to see how their plans could affect other groups—for better or for worse. 

Depending on Historical Data
Traditional forecasting is usually built on historical data, ignoring any forward-looking indicators that could show a preview of what’s to come and how that would affect the business. Historical trends also do not always accurately reflect future scenarios, which means that using them for future predictions could negatively impact the accuracy of such predictions. 

Connecting for Continuous Planning

So if traditional budgeting and forecasting isn’t going to cut it anymore, then what’s next? The answer is: connected and continuous planning.

According to a Deloitte Global planning, budgeting, and forecasting survey, 51 percent of organizations cite disconnected systems as their top challenge in moving from siloed planning to a cross-functional approach. Yet the organizations that are excelling at planning are the ones constantly running multiple scenarios and planning for contingencies. And they do this with up-to-date input from various lines of business. 

If that version of unified planning sounds like a pipe dream, it’s not. You can make it a reality with the help of technology. 

Having the right technology in place can eliminate most if not all of the challenges we outlined above that traditional budgeting faces. That’s not to say your budgeting can’t still be done in Excel. Your team can certainly build rolling forecasts and budgets in a spreadsheet, but beware: You’re still at risk of creating a time-consuming static plan based on historical data. 

That is, if you’re relying on a static spreadsheet. 

Budgeting and Forecasting with Connected Spreadsheets

Does that mean relearning entire new systems in order to run numbers and populate budgets for forecasting? Hardly. It just means it’s time to look at building a connected spreadsheet with data integration that lets you bring to-the-moment data into your spreadsheets for a clear picture of where the business is and where it needs to go next.

Data integration works to pull crucial data from your most-used data sources into a centralized location—such as Excel—to make it easier to manipulate, analyze, and report on for budgets and forecasting. This means even the most disparate data can be easily combined into one location, whether that data is from sales, marketing, or finance. 

Data integration also leverages a dynamic connection, which means you can refresh the data to reflect to-the-moment numbers on a regularly scheduled basis for easy rolling forecasting, or on demand with the click of a button. 

Integration solutions such as ExtendInsights are purpose-built to help you keep working where you and your teams are most comfortable and familiar—Excel—while making it simple and efficient to pull data from NetSuite saved searches, HubSpot reports, Chargebee subscription data, and more into a dynamic spreadsheet. With direct integrations enabled between Excel and your top data sources via ExtendInsights, you can be sure you’re always reporting with and making decisions on the most accurate and up-to-date information available. Not to mention that tracking in a spreadsheet makes this information available across the organization, not just to those who have direct access to your data sources. Which means that siloed forecasting can quickly become a thing of the past and you can move forward with more accurate budgets and forecasting. 

See how ExtendInsights can improve your budgeting and forecasting. Try it FREE today.