Anaplan for Finance software provides fast, reliable processes and delivers robust insight for faster, agile decision-making.
Planning, budgeting, forecasting, specialty finance and operational planning software to empower the right decisions and drive performance.
To find out how Anaplan can help, contact us for a personalised demo.
Transcript
Welcome to another Bedford Consulting spotlight video, focusing on finance. Anaplan’s cloud-native platform is accessed securely on any device and enables you to automate and improve manual spreadsheet processes to create timely and reliable plans, analysis, and reports.
Dashboards: The end user achieves this through dashboards. These dashboards are designed to be self-service, meaning end-users can come into Anaplan and surface the data they need without the need to ask finance, making them more self-sufficient. The dashboards you see on screen are interactive, dynamic, and use security, so you can build a core set, and everyone can use the same but only see what they’re supposed to see.
The data within a plan is held against hierarchies, which are essentially parent-child lists. In this example, we have countries that roll up into regions or continents and then up into our total company. Anaplan allows me to pick a country, and it will show me the slice of data beneath it. Or I can select a region, such as Europe, or the total company, and it will naturally and automatically roll up and aggregate into totals. With Anaplan, you have complete control over how many hierarchies you slice any piece of data by and the level the hierarchies go to. For instance, we’re going down to the country level here, but you could go down to any level of detail depending on what you’re planning.
The date on the screen is also split by time and by version or scenario. Time can be at any level, from yearly down to daily. For the versions, we have our actuals, rolling forecast, and as many planning versions as you need. Another key benefit of Anaplan is that all data is linked and flows through in real-time, meaning any change to a number flows through not only this same dashboard but the whole model right into our integrated financial statements.
Revenue Planning: When it comes to planning, Anaplan supports a number of ways to plan, such as top-down, bottom-up, zero-based, and incremental. For revenue planning, we’ll start by setting a top-down revenue growth assumption centrally, which can then be used down at the country level. In this top-down example, we’re at the very top level, so this is our region. I can apply a growth factor, say a 6% growth, and it will apply that to all the countries within Europe. You can also choose to override that on a country-by-country basis. Anaplan allows you to plan down to the most granular level based on your organisational hierarchy.
Opex Planning: Moving on to OPEX planning, this dashboard is a landing page for a budget holder at a department level. This dashboard provides all the supporting information required for a budget holder in this particular department to do budget setting. Workflow controls when someone can enter their data, enforces commentary, and provides flags for exceeding targets.
Workflow: We also have a top-down view of the workflow. It shows the status of the workflow across the entire organisation, from continental regions to individual departments. It provides total oversight of the budgeting process for overheads.
Scenario Analysis: Once you’ve completed entering your budgets, Anaplan allows for powerful what-if scenario analysis on your budgets or forecasts. You can quickly and easily change drivers to see the effect on your budget. For example, you can analyse the impact of increases in national insurance or taxes.
Reporting: Reporting in Anaplan is easy through fully customisable dashboards. You can break down your P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, and drill down into monthly views. You can split the data by entity and do this across all scenarios (actual, forecast, and budget).
External Stakeholders: You can easily produce consistently styled management report pages and slide decks for external stakeholders, including visualisations and commentary based on the data in your plan models. This ensures that all end users have secure access to one version of the truth and the latest live numbers.
Thanks for watching. If you want more information about FP&A in Anaplan or would like a more detailed demonstration, please speak to us, and we’ll be happy to help. English
