Here’s something they don’t teach you in FP&A school:
The logistics of managing a budget grows exponentially 📈 with the number of departments submitting budgets.
..and somewhere between $100M and $1B of annual revenue, the logistical challenge becomes a certified PAIN 😩.
In response, some companies will reduce their budget scope and plan everything centrally out of their FP&A office, foregoing the huge benefits that come with distributed budgeting.
In this video, we’ll show you how FP&AI allows you to manage distributed budgeting across your organization with ease. Amplify finance productivity by giving your FP&A team the ability to manage 10x the number of budget submissions than they do today.
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👋 I’m an FP&A Tech expert at Constellaition
🏢 100+ successful solutions for 40+ customers over 12+ years
💡 Our FP&AI solution is a best-practice budgeting and forecasting application built on the Anaplan platform.
💸 Combine your business data with our Anaplan/FP&A experience for a flexible and future-proof foundation – without reinventing the wheel or breaking the bank.
❓ Interested in learning more? Reach out today!
Timestamp Captions 00:01 – 00:04 Hi there, I’m Zaf Kamar and I’m back with another episode 00:04 – 00:07 of our series How to FP&AI. In today’s video, we’re going 00:07 – 00:10 to be talking about collaboration and workflow in Anaplan 00:10 – 00:13 FP&AI. One of the biggest hidden time siphons in compiling 00:13 – 00:16 budgets and forecasts is the time that it takes to compile, 00:16 – 00:19 disseminate, collect and review templates. Even the thought 00:19 – 00:23 of managing the logistics here is enough for some companies 00:23 – 00:26 to forgo distributed planning. Altogether, that’s a recipe 00:26 – 00:29 for a lack of budget ownership, forecasting accuracy, and 00:29 – 00:31 poor business partnering practices. 00:31 – 00:34 Fortunately, FP&AI’s inbuilt collaboration and workflow 00:34 – 00:37 functionality will reduce the time spent on these 00:37 – 00:40 activities from dozens or hundreds of hours down to 0. 00:40 – 00:43 Let’s get started. 00:44 – 00:47 Today we’ll take a look at collaboration and workflow for 00:47 – 00:50 an example annual planning process. FP&AI provides the 00:50 – 00:53 ability to track budget, submission of revenue, operating 00:53 – 00:56 expenses, and personnel expenses for each department 00:56 – 00:59 underneath a business unit or company. 00:59 – 01:03 Status is tracked using the following flags either not 01:03 – 01:07 started in process, I need help or completed. 01:07 – 01:10 As I go through my planning process in app collaboration 01:10 – 01:13 functionality enables leaders and planners to go back and 01:13 – 01:15 forth toward completion of their plans. So let’s say for 01:15 – 01:18 example here for sales and marketing, I said, hey, I need 01:18 – 01:21 help here and a planner would be able to come in and would 01:21 – 01:24 be able to write OK, can we take a look? 01:24 – 01:27 At trade show. 01:27 – 01:29 Expenses. 01:29 – 01:34 And the leaders will be able to respond back. Sure thing. 01:38 – 01:41 Although you can use outside communication tools, what’s 01:41 – 01:43 nice about this is the timestamping and auditability within 01:43 – 01:46 the Anaplan platform. Any change that I make in the system 01:46 – 01:50 can be tracked using the Show history dialogue. 01:50 – 01:53 In this screen here, what we can see is full auditability. 01:53 – 01:56 Any change I make is tracked, including who made the change, 01:56 – 01:59 when they made that change, and the previous value 01:59 – 02:02 immutably going back to the beginning of the model. 02:02 – 02:04 And what’s more, I can also leverage the messaging 02:04 – 02:07 capabilities of Anaplan to directly message my team members 02:07 – 02:11 so we can work on things together. 02:16 – 02:18 As budgets get submitted, users in the BU leader or 02:18 – 02:21 Corporate FP&A roles are able to scan across their 02:21 – 02:24 domains and filter through what parts of their budgets are 02:24 – 02:25 still outstanding. 02:25 – 02:28 Leveraging the filtering functionality up on screen here 02:28 – 02:30 once a department completes all areas of their budget, 02:30 – 02:33 which I can do over here. 02:34 – 02:37 It then opens up for the BU leader to review. If all looks 02:37 – 02:42 good, I can give my digital stamp of approval. 02:42 – 02:45 The whole idea behind collaboration and workflow is we see 02:45 – 02:48 it on screen here, is to enable distributed budgeting. That 02:48 – 02:51 is to say that the budget owners in the field are the ones 02:51 – 02:54 who are managing the submission of their own budgets. The 02:54 – 02:57 distributed budgeting paradigm, which I’ll do another video 02:57 – 02:59 on soon, delivers huge benefits to companies, but somewhere 02:59 – 03:02 between 100 million and about a billion of annual revenue. 03:02 – 03:05 The logistics of managing A distributed budget through 03:05 – 03:08 emails, pings and Excel trackers, yeah, right, becomes a 03:08 – 03:11 cumbersome and laborious activity. Do not forego the 03:11 – 03:12 benefits of this paradigm. 03:12 – 03:15 Automate those cumbersome activities with the collaboration 03:15 – 03:18 and workflow capabilities of FP&AI. That’s all for today. 03:18 – 03:21 I’ll see you in the next video.
