Performance Reporting on Your Investments
How to optimize reporting and planning processes using technology
Q: How is SimpleFi helping companies manage monthly planning and reporting requirements?
A: Whether your company is pre-revenue or an established industry leader, accurate and timely monthly reporting and business planning is key to effective management.
Many times, this key function is taken for granted, leading to misstatements, lost or missing data, bottlenecks or worse.
Internal captive staff may not have adequate experience to define processes, technology and redundancies required of this key business function. We help companies by bringing SimpleFi’s industry-leading planning and reporting processes in a flexible managed-service approach. We define and document your processes to make it simple for either your internal resources or our team of experts to manage month over month with no gray area.
Q: How does technology help?
A: Leading FP&A (financial planning and analysis) functions require well-defined processes to set the framework, followed by a team of experts to manage this function for you monthly. We know that. And we know that the top-tier experts are really good at leveraging technology to shorten the time to report, automate repetitive tasks and provide a central, secured, trusted repository for reporting. The tool of choice of these leaders is not Excel alone but rather purpose-built applications to manage performance reporting, cash requirements, planning, etc. Not only do the best professionals leverage technology, but as a company stakeholder, it is important that your valuable data is not just an Excel “database” but a system with controls you can trust, regardless of who is publishing the reports.
Related content: SimpleFi Solutions HR Planning and Analytics
Q: Why did you found PlaniFi? And what is it?
A: Our team has been automating FP&A processes for over a decade. Much changes industry to industry, but a lot of the framework for performance management of sales, profitability, cash flows, people costs and capital deployed stay the same. So why are companies still starting from scratch building applications to meet these requirements, company by company?
As our company moved to the cloud, we took the opportunity to build a platform as a service, with prepackaged applications for all the common business cases we have seen in more than 200 deployments. Our PlaniFi platform contains common business planning and monthly reporting scenarios you can deploy within weeks. For large, complex organizations, our technology platform provides a much better starting point to decrease time spent and cost configuring or optimizing your monthly processes by 30%-50%.
For large, complex organizations, our technology platform provides a much better starting point to decrease time spent and cost configuring or optimizing your monthly processes by 30%-50%.
Q: What is the underlying technology for your platform?
A: As we moved to the cloud, we partnered with and evaluated all the enterprise performance management (EPM) vendors. Ultimately, we found SAP’s cloud technology to be the best home for our platform. And we found SAP’s partner ecosystem to be very supportive of our mission. In addition, the decision to invest on top of SAP’s technology stack provides SAP customers and non-SAP customers alike with our industry-leading content backed by SAP’s robust automation, modeling and analytics as the framework.
Jonathan Essig is Managing Partner of SimpleFi Solutions
