Overview
Having the capacity to understand how changes can affect the organization’s ability to achieve its high-level corporate goals is essential in today’s fast-paced business environment. Being able to create and compare multiple “what if” scenarios, test assumptions, and model the business to meet targets and high-level objectives helps yield the competitive advantage every business seeks.
Organizations need the flexibility to modify budgets as business conditions change. They also recognize the need for a system that can visibly and measurably link the budget to the organization’s business plan.
Infor10 CPM Planning and Budgeting helps organizations like yours test various combinations of targets, forecasts, key business drivers, and organizational structures within minutes to create useful, realistic financial and operational plans. The software performs all the calculations, enabling you to see instantly how a change in one variable affects others.
You can use the planning functionality to set top-down targets, create driver-based plans, produce pro forma statements, and review predictive analytics, all in a collaborative environment. When you save a plan and its associated business assumptions to the central database, you can use this information to seed the budget and compare the plan against actual results as they become available.
Infor10 CPM Planning and Budgeting also enables organizations like yours to transform budgeting into a collaborative and meaningful process that reflects the realworld needs of your organization. With this software, you can design any number of zero-based, historical-based, and rolling budgets and plans. Incorporating a Microsoft® Excel® interface on top of a central database, Infor10 CPM’s budgeting functionality lets you retain the familiar look and feel of spreadsheets while eliminating the drawbacks and ensuring a single version of the truth. When a business change occurs, you easily can adjust the budget and save it to the database, relying on the system to automatically update numbers and reports affected by the change.
Planning
Infor10 CPM’s planning functionality allows you to model your business quickly and test multiple scenarios easily to help you prepare realistic financial and operational plans that will enable your organization to achieve its goals.
Benefit from experience—collaboration
Entrusting a small group of people to create plans for the organization is one method of planning. A “best practices” method is to enable many people from across the organization to collaborate, allowing the company to benefit from a variety of perspectives and a wealth of experience. Infor10 CPM Planning and Budgeting enables collaboration through web-based access to plans and data in the central data repository. Additionally, this information later can be used for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and analysis.
Test “what if”—preparation
Infor’s solution enables you to comprehensively model your business and perform real-time “what if” scenario planning. Infor10 CPM Planning and Budgeting software allows you to change a business assumption and then automatically recalculates the entire model for you, freeing you to concentrate on the actual plan instead of the math. With this solution, you can build in calculations, allocations, phasing, market factors, seasonality, and more. Because you work with a familiar Microsoft Excel interface and have information stored in a central, secure database, you retain productivity as well as achieve more control over the process and plan versions. You can even include relational and OLAP data in your models to achieve a more accurate view of the business.
Achieve financial goals—calculation
Using Infor’s solution, you can work backwards from a key financial goal to the input numbers, percentages, and ratios required to achieve the goal. You simply type in your goal, select the contributing business drivers to be investigated, and let the software perform the calculations and suggest adjustments. With Infor’s solution, you easily can see how key performance drivers—such as price, volume, capacity, customer profitability, and other variables—impact your financial objectives.
Budgeting
Whether your organization does business locally or globally, Infor10 CPM’s budgeting functionality helps you manage, streamline, and improve the integrity of this critical business process.
Manage the process—control
Infor10 CPM Planning and Budgeting provides a number of capabilities to help you document the budgeting process, educate system users across the organization, monitor company-wide budget submissions and approvals from anywhere at anytime, and enforce budget rules and timelines. The central communication portal, guided workflow capabilities, electronic budget submission and approval process, and automated exception alerts are just some of the tools that will help you gain control over this process.
Streamline the tasks—speed
Using the web or the application’s familiar Excel interface, your approved system users can submit and retrieve data easily from anywhere at anytime. They can even load data directly from source systems or data warehouses. Users submit budget figures directly to the solution’s central database, where the numbers are automatically consolidated, eliminating the need for the time-consuming, errorprone processes of manually collecting and re-keying data from potentially hundreds of contributors. While multiple budget passes can be saved, all system users work from the same version of the data for each pass, ensuring accuracy and eliminating version control problems.
Improve the integrity—accuracy
Infor10 CPM Planning and Budgeting provides a number of built-in capabilities to help ensure the accuracy of your organization-wide budget. Some of these include support for indicating whether a number should be treated as financial or non-financial, translating multiple currencies, viewing multiple currency rate versions (actuals, budgets, forecasts), allocating portions of the budget to business units or departments, phasing budgets over a specified time period, and creating detailed salary and asset budgets. You also can modify the budget when business conditions change, and rely on Infor’s solution to automatically and immediately duplicate the changes throughout the system.