Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting is a process and system designed to help organizations to link strategy to plans and execution.

It’s a LIFE-cycle that organizations go through:

• Setting goals and budgets.
• Defining plans.
• Closing the books.
• Reporting the results to stakeholders.

Organizations perform a variety of analytics to understand “why” the results are above or below expectations and model various business scenarios that can impact future performance. Modeling questions include, for example:

1. What if we raise prices?
2. What if we move resources from one region or product line to another?
3. What’s the impact on revenue and profits?
4. What data do we need to determine appropriate expansion decisions?

These ritualistic and necessary process organizations go through on a regular basis — monthly, quarterly, and/or annually – is our “raison d’etre” and we help you discover where to best allocate capital and operational funding.

When it’s done right, EPM will:

• Improve efficiency by eliminating spreadsheets and making your planning and reporting processes go faster.
• Improve accountability by getting more line managers involved in the planning process and empowering managers with self-service access to financial and operating results.
• Provide insights into the business that maybe aren’t visible on the surface and which are actionable — so it creates greater business agility.

Year-end financial results rarely match up exactly with the budget that was set at the beginning of the fiscal year.  This is simply because a business activity is highly dynamic and unexpected things happen over the course of the year such as:

• Economic conditions change.
• Industries are disrupted.
• Competitors change tactics.
• Employee turn over.
• Technology advances.

Here is the stress test:

• Are you operating on static financial budgets with outdated business assumptions?
• Is your company running a business on spreadsheets – but – your company has scaled up and you are noticing the bleed aka. things start to come apart at the seams.
• You’ve discovered conflicting versions , calculation errors, inaccuracies in reporting and planning, and the finance team are stuck in reconciling gaps.
• Is your company still working on the paper and not in the cloud?

We work with you to solve these pain points. Imagine your managers having access to real-time insights into key performance metrics delivered through interactive dashboards and reports. These can be addressed with a well thought-out Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting solution.

Astral Solutions Group’s Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Solution can be configured to fit your organizations’ individual requirements, irrespective of size, diversity, and locations.