5 things to know about Bedford’s FP&A Application
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Are you looking for a way to improve your FP&A processes with Anaplan, the leading cloud-based planning platform? Our FP&A App is the right choice to help you achieve your goals quickly and with ease.
Our FP&A App contains the most used functionality required for forecasting gross margin, costs and other financial metrics with enhanced accuracy. It also provides a full suite of reports that give you insight into your business performance and help you make informed decisions. It is designed to help you implement Anaplan models in your organisation with minimal effort and maximum efficiency.
Lis De Geus, Principal Solution Architect, and one of the creators of the App shares some of the key benefits you can expect from choosing to start your Anaplan journey with the FP&A App:
1. Get up and running quickly.
Our FP&A App is pre-built with the essential components and logic that you need for your forecasting processes. We will configure it so that you can simply import your data, adjust the planning assumptions and start using the model right away.
Often, the biggest challenge is to know what you want to be built when you are just starting to learn about the tool. With the FP&A App, you will receive pre-written user stories that can be reviewed and tailored to your needs. These user stories describe the main features and functionalities of the model, as well as the expected outcomes. They provide guidance to understanding the default model features so that we can focus on the customisation requirements.
The FP&A App is a comprehensive and coherent solution that follows the best practices and standards of FP&A processes and Anaplan modelling techniques based on years of experience within our team. It has a clear and consistent structure, a user-friendly interface and a robust calculation engine. It also ensures data quality, security and integrity by creating validation pages which easily display any issues or need for master data updates. The FP&A App is built by experienced Anaplan experts who have deep knowledge of the tool and the FP&A processes.
Our FP&A App relies on the basic pre-built elements, but it is configured to tailor your organisation’s structure and has room for incorporating further customisation. We can adjust the dimensions, formulas, assumptions and scenarios to suit your specific needs and preferences. We can also add new features or reports to enhance the functionality of the model. Best of all, you can learn how to create these enhancements and reports yourself with our team’s guidance, since Anaplan has a simple interface with no coding required.
You can use the FP&A App as the first step on your Anaplan journey. From there, you can learn from the tool and see the potential to incorporate other business processes into the platform towards a full connected planning experience. To name a few, think of the potential of incorporating the commercial team sales plan, the recruitment plans from HR and even the investment portfolio into your financial planning. The FP&A App can serve as a foundation for building more complex and integrated models that can drive value across your whole organisation.
“Having started my career working in different FP&A roles, I could immediately see the benefit of having Anaplan as our planning platform. It enabled our internal teams to work together on the same platform towards a common goal, and made it easy to trace back formulas, understand the results and check when an override was made. However, after some time, I could also tell that we could make our models better. The approach of lift-and-shift the worksheet activities into Anaplan is not always the best, as it will also carry over potential problems of the process. Being able to start your Anaplan journey with models that bring best-in-class FP&A processes can be a remarkable advantage which will leverage your future experience on the platform.” Lis De Geus
Our FP&A App model is a powerful and practical solution that can help you streamline your FP&A processes, improve your forecasting activities and enhance your business performance. If you are interested in learning more about our product watch a personalised demo here.
