Man with laptop using Phocas to drill into key information and follow his train of thought to gain insights, while empowering his team to make informed decisions.

Future of planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting - make important and timely decisions

Please welcome our third guest blogger of the year, Daniel Cuthew, VICE President of Strategic Partnerships at Phocas Software. Phocas is one of our newest operational partners and will be working with us to deliver business planning and analytics solutions to NetSuite users. And if you want to learn more how drill into key information and follow your train of thought to gain insights – while empowering your team to make informed decisions – read on but why not also register for our free webinar with Daniel.

The webinar entitled ‘Make data-driven decision using your NetSuite ERP with Phocas Software’ is being held on Thursday, 23 June at 11am. Click the title to find out more and to register.

Now over to Daniel…

 

Business CEOs and leaders as well as business partners are demanding more of their finance teams. New demands include more internal requests for custom reporting, more frequent planning and reporting cycles and faster turnaround with analysis – all compounded by increasing business complexity, more data and systems, and ongoing change.

Finance leaders need to free themselves from spreadsheets and manual processes by introducing advanced and specialised corporate performance management and planning budgeting and forecasting applications, if they are to champion strategic planning and decision making.

The pandemic profoundly escalated the need for speed to enable strategic decision-making, but decision-making can only happen at the slowest component of the performance management cycle. As a result, organisations are increasingly transforming their Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting (PBF) and financial reporting not to get ahead, but to stay afloat.

Phocas recently sponsored a survey from over 500 senior finance professionals to uncover where organisations’ Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting and reporting processes stand today and highlight their PBF and reporting strategies.

Phocas dashboard which allows finance leaders to free themselves from spreadsheets and manual processes by introducing advanced and specialised corporate performance management and planning budgeting and forecasting applications.

 

The future of spreadsheets is connectivity

Spreadsheets have dominated the planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting landscape for decades, but there are palpable signs that the spreadsheet monopoly is at last coming to an end.

The survey shows that their usage by the end of the decade is forecast to go through a sharp decline, with a commensurate increase in the popularity of best of breed planning, budgeting and forecasting tools, Corporate Performance Management systems and applications that allow spreadsheets to be connected to a centralised database.

Two women using Phocas on a touchscreen for planning, budgeting and forecasting because of its ease of access, speed of deployment and suitability for a hybrid working environment.

 

The pandemic highlighted the limitations of spreadsheets while working under duress. According to previous research, they are simply not agile enough to cope with the pace of change, and in many cases existing legacy applications prove to be too slow. Instead, the cloud and the solutions in it are being recognised more and more for their agility.

 

Cloud-based solutions for planning, budgeting and forecasting are becoming the natural choice because of ease of access, speed of deployment and suitability for a hybrid working environment.

 

The aspiration is there. A year ago, 10% to 12% of organisations used specialist software in the majority or all of their business units. The current research shows the possibility of a threefold increase in the application of specialised planning, budgeting and forecasting systems by the end of the decade.

A good business planning and analytics platform provides both data quality and speed. Phocas helps improve responsiveness and data integrity by connecting directly to your business application and ERP solution. Phocas provides dynamic self -service access to data to all business users, becoming the single source of truth for consolidated and accurate data.

Download the report here.

 

Join the upcoming Webinar, ‘Make data-driven decisions using your NetSuite ERP with Phocas Software’ on 23 June at 11 am by signing up here.

Contact our expert team here at BrightBridge to schedule a demo and learn more about how Phocas Software can be used with NetSuite.

 

 

About the author: Daniel Cuthew is the VICE President of Strateigc Partnerships in EMEA at Phocas Software. Highly-trained in computer science with an in-depth understanding of users, requirements gathering, and market trends, he is focused on helping businesses to increase customer satisfaction through process improvement.

About Phocas: Phocas is a cloud-based software provider that is committed to helping people feel good about using data. Phocas makes it easy to drill down through all levels of NetSuite data from high-level visual summaries into the underlying data and arrive at insights to make better decisions. Phocas is preferred by non-technical people from sales to purchasing to executives.