Budgets & Forecasting

Budgets and forecasting should be efficient value-add processes. But they aren't. Spreadsheet templates are difficult to hand off, users overwrite formulas, rollups have too many errors — and integration of actuals is a zoo! Analytics such as scenario analysis and KPIs take a back seat.

With Alight Planning, you cut planning cycles in half and measurably improve analysis of the numbers and insights into the business. Difficult integration issues like converting a budget into a rolling forecast or importing actuals are seamless.

Alight changes the planning experience by delivering new structures and interfaces that make financial planning and analysis an effective process — heavy on analytics, light on maintenance.

Set up a solid collaboration process with access security
Integrate between planning models and with actuals
Visibility into the numbers with reporting & analysis

Set up a solid collaboration process with access security

Budgets and forecasting are fundamental to pushing responsibility to line managers and facilitating collaboration. Here's how the process should work...

• User access — The planning staff sets up the templates that line managers use for sales and expense budgets. With spreadsheets, links to activity drivers in the templates often don't work across department and product workbooks. ("This file contains links to other workbooks..." Sound familiar?) In Alight, the plan administrator sets up users with visibility to only permitted information; links still work across functional areas. The administrator can also set up Key Measures groups with security access, incorporating the most important inputs and metrics for individual users.
• True bottoms up — Plan structures include administrator maintained line items with links for payroll taxes, benefits, headcount driven expenses, and more. In addition, users must create their own line items that capture valuable thinking below natural class accounts — e.g., it's not just a travel budget; it's travel for conferences, travel for customer visits, etc. With Alight, users can be locked out of admin controlled line items but still be assigned variable levels of privileges for creating their own items — e.g. change values only versus creating line items with linking.
• Consolidating user inputs should be seamless. With spreadsheets, however, templates come back with broken links and overwritten formulas making consolidation a grueling task. Alight consolidation is seamless, protecting input variables and linked relationships. Additional features allow the plan administrator to audit user inputs before consolidating and "cherry pick" which line items to accept or reject.
• Audit trails — The two most feared questions in financial planning are: "Where did that number come from?" and "Why did that number change?" Spreadsheets don't provide audit trails. Alight does: tracking of changes by time stamp, user and color coded values; system generated notes with tracking of object based links; flagged user generated notes; process controls; and a lot more.

Integrate between planning models and with actuals

Integrating planning models — that is, ensuring a consistent flow of assumptions and linking between strategic plans, budgets and rolling forecasts — is always a challenge. Alight Planning incorporates features that let you work seamlessly with all three plans types — plus integration of actuals into any of the three plan types:

• Market planning — Alight includes structures for market and product planning that allow you to set up activity models with complex linking as backup for the revenue plan. You can do this by product, channel, region, customer type or by using industry specific drivers. Such market planning can be directly incorporated into operating plans — e.g. relating marketing budgets for lead generation to the sales funnel; using product volumes to drive sales staffing; etc.
• Levels of detail vary between strategic plans, budgets and rolling forecasts — for example, different time horizons, consolidation points and modeling structures. With Alight, you can easily convert long range plans into budgets and rolling forecasts, then build on or modify structures including adding a chart of accounts. Using the operating budget as a foundation for rolling forecasts is automatic — both plan types are created using Alight's stage based planning and scenario tools. Both reside in the same file.
• Integrating actuals into financial plans is usually a mess. Financial and operating results are spread across multiple databases. Actual results and plan detail are at different levels. Lack of underlying volumes and rates make meaningful causal analysis difficult. You want apples to apples. Too often you get fruit salad. Alight solves these problems with a sophisticated system mapping design that allows import of financial and operating actuals data into plan files from virtually any database structure.

Visibility into the numbers with reporting & analysis

The mechanics of spreadsheet budgeting are so consuming that you don't have much time for analysis. With Alight Planning, you not only cut the budget and forecast cycle in half, you save even more time using Alight's automated reporting and analysis tools:

• Universal reports — No report generation interface is easier. Just select the data and operator columns you want, then click on a report where you want the columns to appear. Alight's intelligent operator columns automatically compute quarter and year totals, dollar and percentage variances, averages, run rates, and other analytics — no formulas required. One standard report format — e.g. a causal analysis that explains volume and rate variances in headcount — automatically replicates across other worksheets.
• Key measures is Alight's dashboard for managing inputs and viewing results. You can track the most important financial and operating metrics in your business in a single pane separate from the main worksheet where line items are created. Since there is user-level security on key measures groups, you can use key measures to focus users on their own KPIs and critical assumptions.
• Impact analysis in Alight is the most powerful sensitivity analysis interface ever designed. With a single click, you can automatically generate a ranked list of the most important assumptions that impact sales, profit or any targeted variable in the plan. Answer questions like these: "What are all of the line items with inputs that affect gross margin?" and "What would be the financial impact on gross margin in rank order if each were increased 10%?"
• Goal seek — Set a goal for sales, profit or any variable, then see how much an input assumption must change to meet the goal. (Ever try this in Excel? It's hard to do and breaks.) Alight's goal seek is an intuitive interface that works automatically in conjunction with impact analysis. A 'must have' tool for answering many hard core planning questions, especially for complex break-even analysis.
• Scenario analysis — Scenarios are independent sets of assumptions about the business, typically sharing the same model structures but with different inputs. With Alight you can create as many as 100 scenarios to depict alternate rolling forecasts, decisions analyses, strategies and best/worst cases. You can quickly create alternate scenarios using stage based planning by assigning stages — e.g. current products versus new products — to time periods.