Services
Financial Planning & Analysis Services
To budget or not to budget? That is a great question. But whether you spend months or weeks on the process, will it actually provide added value and be achieved? Is the annual cycle worth the pain, and are you actually winning?
When it comes to the budgeting process, how long do you spend on it? Is it top-down or bottom-up? What level of detail should you work with? These are all important questions to consider.
But what if you’re looking to go beyond the budget and start implementing a rolling forecast approach? What does such a change actually entail? And how often have you considered adopting a zero-base budgeting philosophy where all costs are to be justified?
Looking to the future, there are many changes on the horizon. Working from home or anywhere, arranging meetups once a month at a venue you hire for the occasion, and improving life-work balance are just a few of the possibilities. These changes can lead to less stress, improved mental health, a greener economy, and increased productivity while costing the business less money.
So, what changes do you anticipate, and how are you reviewing the options in your forecasts? Let’s discuss whenever you’re ready.
Do you need help to build/improve your budgeting/forecasting models?
Are you looking to outsource your budgeting/forecasting process?
Should you use Excel or specialist software?
A good BI system helps an organisation to improve its decision-making.
Information and insights from business data can easily be shared and updated in real-time.
A full picture of each customer should be easily visible from the information available. Both the favourable trends and areas that may suggest the business is failing should be easily identifiable to enable actions to be taken.
As a Finance team, you will want to be able to identify who your high-value customers are, and a good BI solution will enable this. Determining if the marketing plan is yielding great results with better product engagement through increased sales, can be answered in seconds.
Well-designed dashboards will help to ensure that everyone gets engaged.
From simple weekly and monthly sales reporting to key client analysis, performance management becomes easily trackable with the correct KPIs and metrics displayed and compared to targets.
Automated month-end reporting that provides the key snapshots of debtors, creditors, capex, revenue broken down by customer segments and regions or geographies. Gross margins analysed in full using drill-down functionality. Overhead analysis to ensure costs are being controlled and full transparency provided. A review of staffing costs and future capacity needs available and incorporating the latest forecast data.
Good business intelligence helps you to understand your business better.
If you would appreciate some help and assistance with the streamlining of your reporting processes and perhaps would like to discuss automating your month-end reports, then please do get in contact.
Which BI Tool should you use?
Do you need some databse development?
So, you have lots of customers, that’s great…. but how many are really profitable?
You offer a wide selection of products to keep them happy… however, it may be a question that less is more… which of these products are really profitable?
Let’s analyse your customers and product range to clarity your true profit margins and contribution levels.
Provide us with the data, and let us provide you the results:
Profit by Customers e.g., Top 10 / by Customer Group
Year-on-Year, Quarter-on-Quarter, Month-on-Month, Week-on-Week
Sales by Product Category and Sub-category
Product range review analysis
Heat Map analysis
Geographic analysis
Let us undertake an analysis of your sales data so that you can better understand your customers.
If you’d like an initial customer/product profitability diagnostic undertaken then please do get in contact.
With the right Sales Analysis by Product/ Service and by Customer type you can gain a better understanding of where to focus your attention
Do you have too many products/service offerings that you need to be more focused?
Just how profitable are your customers in reality?
For many businesses the integrated financial statement model (profit & Loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statement) is critical to identifying what the financial future will entail. While the starting point will usually reflect the past and use historical actuals to guide the outlook, this is only the starting point as a range of scenarios and what-if analysis are likely to enter into the equation.
Often it is critical for sales teams to have a simple model that enables them to determine what the impact will be on gross margins if they discount prices too far. More sophisticated versions would factor in the product or service mix and even adjust for different types of customer. But ultimately, they should be simple and straightforward to use and provide clear answers for the salesperson.
A new project may need to be carefully modelled to identify the expected outcomes with regular updates made to the forecast. If the project has a fixed price that has been agreed, it will be critical to ensure that you don’t allow it to over-run and start to lose the business money.
Whether it is proving value for money or carrying out a full cost-benefit analysis a good solid financial model should enable a proper appraisal easily. It should enhance and improve confidence allowing for a more informed decision-making process.
If you are planning any major investments in order to replace an existing asset, to improve customer service, or looking to reduce operating costs and increase efficiencies and remove bottlenecks from processes, you will no doubt be needing some kind of financial model to enable you to evaluate the potential investments in terms of NPV, IRR or payback periods.
Let’s help make that possible.
Group Consolidations and 3-way Statements
Sales Plan across Geographical sectors
Project Performance Projections
Pricing Strategy and Inflationary Scenarios
Investment Appraisals and Funding Models for Investors
Cash flow forecasting is crucial to a business, since it helps to:
identify potential cash flow problems
plan for future cash shortages
manage surpluses efficiently
make informed decisions about pricing, business planning, and investment opportunities.
So how often are you reviewing it, and is everything looking good and running well?
How are your projects performing? Are all costs under control?
Looking at your overall day to day operations are your sales receipts being paid on time? Have you ensured that your customers aren’t taking too long to pay you?
In regards to your payments are you ensuring that you pay your suppliers within agreed terms, but also not paying too quickly?
Monthly outgoings like rent, rates, insurance, utilities, the monthly payroll and employee expenses, are you constantly using your bank overdraft or lines of credit to pay for these?
Are you aware of when you need to pay your taxes: PAYE, VAT, Corporation Tax?
Are you busy growing your business with new upgrades to equipment or machinery? How are you planning to fund the capital expenditures required?
What rate of return are you achieving from any spare cash available? And what rate of interest are you being charged on any loans or other debts you may have?
Have you got the right balance for the short-term compared to the long-term?
Do you need some assistance to properly estimate your organisations future cash inflows and outflows?
Following Private Equity ownership, it often becomes necessary to setup fresh new reporting suites for the monthly reporting of a company or group of companies.
Is the finance model that was constructed for the sale fit for the future forecasting and monitoring of the business?
How easy will the integration of further acquisitions become? Both in terms of reporting and budgeting requirements? Can you easily compare Actual vs Budget and Forecast and also Prior Year?
Will a new FP&A system be required to streamline processes?
Management Information Improvement Projects often arise following a new CFO or changes in ownership.
How easy is it to extract monthly data from each of the companies across the multiple divisions? Are all companies in the group using the same accounting software?
At Board/Investor level reporting the details are normally invisible, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be easily visible if a deep dive is required into why exactly cost of goods sold has increased 40%.
Do your dashboards automatically update each month?
How did you perform compared to the prior month/year/budget?
Can you easily view both the divisional and operating unit levels at once?
Overhead spend – are all companies within the group aligned in how they treat their overhead categories? Is there some work needed to simplify and standardise the way expenditure is categorised so that and trend analysis reporting is meaningful?
“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” — Napoleon Hill
Whatever your challenge, be it great or small, there will always be a solution that we should be able to help you with.