Visibility into the numbers with reporting & analysis tools

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 dashboard is one of Alight's interfaces 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 (key performance indicators and critical assumptions).
• Sensitivity analysis in Alight is the most powerful interface designed for understanding the drivers in your business. 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 sensivity 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 compare scenarios side-by-side with computation of unit, rate and amount variance and volume/rate causal analysis.