NetSuite Financial Planning and Analysis Part 2

Best Practices To Improve Financial Planning Using Live NetSuite Data

In Part 1 of this blog we focused on the signs that will tell you that your financial planning and analysis processes need to be improved. In this blog, we will suggest how you can modify these processes to improve your financial planning and analysis performance.

First, you need to make sure that you have a solution, like NetSuite’s Financial Planning module, which provides the right platform using powerful inbuilt functionality to save time and eliminate many of the errors inherent in a manual or semi-manual planning process.

What should you look for in such a solution? Here are 6 functions and features that our customers have found most useful:

1. A custom financial planning model designed and controlled by your finance team and simultaneously distributed to all the planners in your organization
2. Immediate consolidation of planning data as soon as this data is saved across multiple organizations, GLs and currencies
3. Built-in formulas that are defined centrally with access controls that can enable or disable user update capability 
4. Workflow tracking that notifies the finance team when planners have completed their plans
5. User security profiles to control access to plans, reports and sensitive information
6. A library of pre-developed reports with multiple views of data, ad hoc analysis capability, formatted HTML, PDF or Excel reporting options and automatic email distribution

Second, it’s not just about the software. Software is the foundation of a good solution but hundreds of successful Financial Planning implementations in companies of all sizes and complexities have exposed the DSG team to a myriad of different financial planning needs, approaches and processes. Our proven Financial Planning and Analysis consultants have an average of over 20 years business experience and understand the keys to customer success when implementing a planning solution.

These keys include ensuring your Project Manager knows the latest financial planning practices and disciplines, not just how to implement financial planning software but, for example, how to develop driver-based budgets and forecasts based on key performance indicators that will provide insights to business success.

In addition, DSG would recommend that you review and potentially redesign your planning process by:

• Simultaneously planning and cross-referencing your revenue forecasts by product, by customer, by line of business, or other categories
• Creating consolidated plans that distribute data-gathering templates within your organization and then automatically aggregate this data 
• Pre-populating your budget plans with prior actuals to enable verification and side-by-side comparisons to facilitate more effective plans
• Automatically importing monthly actuals to more easily enable ongoing forecast processes

DSG strongly believes in spending the time at the outset of a financial planning project to envision the complete solution before doing any development. Our Financial Planning and Analysis consultants and best practices enable you to get maximum value and insights from your data to enable your forecasting and business planning to be more accurate, timely and agile. For more information, please visit www.dsgcloud.com. Photo provided courtesy of

www.freedigitalphotos.net

 The original version of this blog is posted here.