Strong Financial Planning is a key factor to the success of any business.

It allows businesses to obtain the appropriate investment for growth, ensures the right resources are available at the right time for the business and provides a clear roadmap to ongoing success.

It is usual for businesses to mature in their planning capability as they get better at forecasting what is likely to happen in their market.

A key objective is often to get to fully aligned strategic, financial and operational planning and forecasting, and this can be very challenging to achieve.

By tackling each part separately, and keeping it simple, whilst constantly ensuring that the solutions used for each type of planning can be combined, the end goal can be achieved over a period of time!

Concentrating on Financial Planning:

With inputs from both strategic plans and operational plans and forecasts, it should be possible to prepare robust financial plans for profitability, cash flow and fixed asset acquisition.

Many businesses start by using a plethora of spreadsheets to prepare these financial plans and forecasts, and then, as they mature, they move to more automated and controlled systems.

It is important that these systems and applications are fully flexible to ensure that the changes in business structure, as the organisation grows and expands can be easily managed and planned for. Indeed it is often advisable that these applications are owned and managed by the Finance team rather than the IT team, (historically just as the spreadsheets were) so that the application is fully fit for purpose.