4 Things to Look for When Evaluating a Financial Planning Tool

Choosing the right financial planning tool for your organization’s needs is tough.

The right tool not only serves your immediate needs but can also help you achieve your long-term goals and support business growth over time. Plus, getting it right the first time helps you avoid the costly pain of replacing the wrong solution.

With all the bells and whistles available in modern financial planning tools, how can you properly evaluate solutions to find that perfect fit?

We’ve got you covered with four of the most essential factors to evaluate when selecting the right financial planning tool for your organization’s needs.

Let’s dive in.

Why make the leap From Excel?

Many organizations currently manage their FP&A processes using offline Excel spreadsheets passed back and forth over email.

This may work in the early stages of a business, but as your organization grows and expands, running the business on Excel spreadsheets won’t cut it.

It’s challenging to collect and share budgets, plans, and reports with a large number of managers and staff in different functions and across multiple locations.

Even more, if you work in an organization with offices in multiple regions or counties, you have to deal with the complexity of doing business in different time zones or currencies. The workflow and data volumes can explode quickly—beyond what spreadsheets can handle.

The next step is to adopt a cloud-based financial performance management tool, like Planful, that can work with your organization’s accounting or ERP system and provide specific support for your FP&A processes.

Selecting a financial planning solution for today – and the future

Cloud-based financial planning solutions offer fast time-to-value, lower the cost of ownership, and provide Finance with more autonomy from IT vs. using on-premises solutions.

Any tool you select must support the following:

Robust, multi-entity financial consolidations
Flexible reporting and analysis
Advanced planning and forecasting, modeling
Integration of real-time data from multiple internal and external sources
Scalability to 100s or 1000s of users

As your organization grows and evolves, look to accommodate your current business needs and consider future requirements over a three- to five-year period.

4 top features of a cloud-based financial planning tool

Here are the top four features we recommend you look for in a cloud-based financial planning tool:

1. End-to-end FP&A functionality
2. A scalable cloud-based platform
3. The familiarity of Excel
4. Powerful, user-friendly reporting

Let’s explore each of these in some more detail.

1. End-to-end FP&A functionality

As your organization grows and evolves, you may encounter additional needs beyond your immediate focus area, such as financial budgeting.

Seek a financial performance management (FPM) solution that supports common requirements like:

Choosing a comprehensive financial planning solution ensures you can meet both your immediate and long-term needs effectively without compromising in any area.

2. A scalable cloud-based platform

As your organization grows and evolves, more users across the business will likely need access to your FP&A tool, particularly budget managers in functions like Sales, Marketing, and HR.

That’s why the solution you select must be user-friendly and require minimal IT upkeep. It also must be flexible enough to house the number of users and volumes of data you need at any given time. This will help you avoid outgrowing your solution over time.

3. The familiarity of Excel

When searching for FP&A tools, it is crucial to replace or reduce an organization’s overreliance on Excel spreadsheets for planning, reporting, modeling, and analysis.

In this scenario, the ability to use Excel-like formulas and Excel for reporting offers significant benefits. It facilitates a smooth transition away from an Excel-based solution. It also empowers users to become productive rapidly, tapping into their existing skill sets and knowledge of Excel.

4. Powerful, user-friendly reporting

Different users in an organization have diverse needs. Senior executives might prefer graphical dashboards for quick insights, while power users in Finance might require advanced analytical capabilities for ad-hoc analysis.

Additionally, board books and regulatory filings may need to be created. It’s crucial to have a comprehensive suite that addresses all these requirements. Otherwise, multiple tools would be necessary to fill the gaps, which can be inconvenient and costly.

Take the next step to select a financial planning tool

Choosing the right financial planning tool is a critical decision for any organization seeking to streamline its FP&A processes, improve decision-making, and support long-term growth.

Basing your evaluation process on the four criteria we’ve discussed will help you properly select the tool that best suits your organization’s needs.

If you’re ready to take that next step, Planful has you covered. Contact us to learn more about Planful’s transformational tool to support FP&A.

Or get a free, on-demand demo to see the platform in action.