According to the 2020 Wisdom of Crowds Enterprise Performance Management Market Study, adoption of enterprise management software increased in 2020. Nearly half of all surveyed organizations now use enterprise performance management (EPM) / corporate performance management (CPM) software, and 78% of survey respondents rated this software as “critical,†“very important,†or “important†to their organization.
Of course, enterprise and corporate performance management software is always useful for Finance and Operations planning, especially during the annual budgeting process, but in a time of economic uncertainty, the budgets that your organization created 12-18 months ago can seem stale and out of date.
Flexible monthly rolling forecasts, which are almost exclusively found in market-leading EPM / CPM software, help keep your Finance and Operations planning fresh and on track throughout unpredictable times, so you can enhance your budgeting agility and maintain your competitive edge.
View templates for forecasting and other critical planning processes.
Why Use Monthly Rolling Forecasts?
“Enterprise performance management software can help organizations manage short-term uncertainty and plan their strategies for the ‘new normal’…†– 2020 Wisdom of Crowds EPM Market Study
Rolling forecasts empower business leaders to continuously plan for the future with insight into the next 12-18 months. Using up-to-date historical data, rolling forecasts can help cultivate more agile organizational planning that helps illuminate how short-term disruptions and adjustments may affect long-term objectives.
In essence, monthly rolling forecasts help companies plan their strategy to overcome economic uncertainty by providing a continuously updating glimpse into the potential future.
Compared to the typical annual budgeting process — which relies heavily on assumptions generated in the past and marches steadily into an unknown future somewhere past the “fiscal cliff†— it is clear why rolling forecasts are critical to success in uncertain times.
Rolling Forecast Usage Is Likely to Increase Due to the Events of 2020
The Wisdom of Crowds study reports that 64% of respondents use rolling forecasts today, and 16% say they have now replaced annual budgets with rolling forecasts (an increase of ~15% YoY). Considering the ongoing disruption caused by COVID and global economic uncertainty, the adoption of monthly rolling forecasts is likely to increase more in 2020.
Would rolling forecasts be right for your organization? Here are a few reasons to consider utilizing this critical tool as a budget manager or executive:
- Monthly rolling forecasts deliver timely insight based on the recent past.
When you planned your 2020 budget, no one had heard of a coronavirus – and you certainly did not expect a coronavirus to shrink the GDP, disrupt global supply chains, or quarantine your workforce in home offices. It is time to recalibrate your numbers.
Now that all this has happened, a monthly rolling forecast can help you strategize what to do next, whereas that annual budget will offer little to no help.
- Rolling forecasts can report on current usage of allocated budgets.
Considering the myriad changes listed above, there is a high probability that your company expenditures have strayed significantly from expectations. For example, your company has probably spent less on conferences and travel. Can you re-allocate those budgets?
Department managers may be hesitant to initiate a conversation with you about the amounts still available in their allocated budgets, but a monthly rolling forecast can shine light onto usage (or lack thereof), so you can plan properly.
Why Not Use Rolling Forecast Tools Built into Your ERP System?
If you are running cloud ERP systems like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, your company has a great accounting system. So, why not use the rolling forecast tools built into your ERP system? Simply put, there aren’t many available. That is why more than 90% of the organizations create their forecast models outside their ERP in manual Excel spreadsheet models.
Now, if it fills your needs, there is cash-flow forecasting and sales forecasting included with some ERP systems, including Dynamics 365 Finance implementations, but no forecasting is available on Government Community Cloud (GCC). If you are a Government agency or you want to use rolling forecasts for a wide variety of Operations and Finance areas, it is a smart idea to invest in a purpose-built, flexible and robust market-leading corporate performance management solution that can provide you with the in-depth insight you need immediately.
Next year’s annual budgeting process is here now, yet leaders across the globe still have few answers or concrete plans to address our uncertain future. The best way for you to plan your organization’s budget is to develop your own glimpse into the future… and the best way to do that is with monthly rolling forecasts.
Make Smarter Decisions Now Using Monthly Rolling Forecasts from Solver
With the current situation, you cannot wait to “see what happens.†Forecasting templates from Solver help you get started with this helpful tool quickly, so you can take a proactive role in your Finance and Operations planning processes.
Rolling forecasts from Solver are fully integrated with a number of ERP systems, including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance (f/k/a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations), and they provide an easy way for you to look forward into what you can expect next year, so you can plan appropriately.
Discover the facts on forecasting during economic uncertainty with this handy how-to from Solver. Â
This article explores the popular Dynamics 365 Business Central cloud ERP system and how you can achieve advanced reporting and budgeting.
After Microsoft’s highly anticipated release of Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365 BC) a few years ago companies evaluating the solution has, as expected, quickly zoomed in on reporting, budgeting and business intelligence (BI) capabilities.
But, let’s zoom out for a moment…after 25 years in the software industry, I have yet to see an ERP system with fantastic reporting, budgeting and BI capabilities built into the ERP. Alas, the world’s most used tool in this area remains the ever popular Microsoft Excel spreadsheet! There is actually a good reason for ERPs failing in this area with their native functionality, and that is that the demands for advanced calculations and formatting, currency conversion, consolidations, budget workflow, custom budget input forms, and charts simply are too much for the otherwise controlled and accounting-focused ERP applications. That is also a main reason why there is a flourishing corporate performance management (CPM) and BI industry out there that plugs these and other planning and decision-making related holes in ERP systems. It has become a symbiotic relationship in many ways with a sometimes elegant dance, especially when there are solid integrations that exist between ERPs, CPM solutions, and BI tools.
So, where does Dynamics 365 Business Central (D365 BC) land in terms of advanced reporting and budgeting? Well, as expected, it has native reporting and budgeting at the typical level where most modern ERPs have it. So…if ERP history is any indication, that means that 90-95% of all D365 BC customers will at least partially be using their beloved Excel spreadsheets for some of their reporting and a lot of their budgeting and forecasting. That is, unless they are ready to step up the CPM game and look at CPM tools like Solver for full blown cloud budgeting, reporting and consolidations that are pre-integrated and also running on Microsoft Azure as a multi-tenant solution.
But wait a minute, that was CPM, but what about BI? Actually, here Microsoft seems to have achieved a home-run in the past few years with Power BI. Not only did Power BI recently become the leader in the Gartner BI Quadrant, but Microsoft has done an excellent job integrating it to D365 BC and many other transaction systems.
So, if you work for an organization that plans to evaluate Dynamics 365 Business Central, between Power BI from Microsoft and advanced CPM solutions like Solver, you should be in good shape to turbo-charge your organization’s decision-making abilities in the years ahead.
Good luck and enjoy your ERP, BI, and CPM journey!
Solver enables world-class decisions with the Solver cloud based CPM suite made up of budgeting, reporting, dashboards, and data warehousing, delivered through a web portal. Solver is reinventing CPM with its next generation user-friendly solution. Solver empowers business users with modern features including innovative use of cloud-connected Excel in the report and budget form design process. If you’re interested in learning more, our team is excited to hear about your organizational needs and goals.
There are more than 200,000 companies running on-premise ERP systems from Microsoft, Sage, SAP and Acumatica world-wide and many are not planning to move to the cloud yet. However, if you are one of them, this does not mean that your company can’t start taking advantage of modern cloud-based reporting solutions today to drive better and faster decisions for yourself and your management team!
Hasn’t Cloud-based reporting for on-premise ERPs been available for a long time?
Yes, vendors like Prophix, Solver, Vena, Adaptive Insights, and Planful (formerly Host Analytics) have offered both cloud-based financial reporting and budgeting for years. However, all of these vendors have typical corporate performance management (CPM) architectures that require data to be loaded from the on-premise ERP and into the cloud CPM tool before the user can run reports.Â
The process requires a “refresh†of data from the ERP database into the CPM database which means that the data users see in reports is not real-time. This also mean that the drill-down on any number is only as detailed as the lowest level data that was loaded into the cloud CPM database.Â
Your executives are often ok with this because they want to wait on their report analysis until the accounting team has closed the books. However, the accounting team that is posting transactions in the ERP system almost always prefers live ERP reporting because they want to immediately see the impact of journal entries in their reports. They don’t want to refresh data into a CPM reporting database first, and then wait one minute, ten minutes or significantly longer to run reports after the data has been transferred to the CPM tool.
How do I get true live reporting for my on-premise ERP GP data? Â
The obvious answer is that you use the report writer that natively comes with your ERP system such as Management Reporter, GP Report Writer, Smartlist or SQL Reporting Services (SSRS). However, at best, it would be safe to say that these tools have aged “gracefully,†and they are just not comparable to many modern cloud reporting tools.
Key weaknesses of on-premise report tools include:
- Not particularly user-friendly for accounting staff to design reports.
- Lack of easy and professional formatting.
- Typically requires VPN or Terminal Server to connect to the ERP in order to run reports from outside the office network.
- Maintaining multiple report writers for different data (e.g. for formatted financial statements versus sub-ledger transaction reports).
In order to overcome these weaknesses and help on-premise ERP customers maximize the value of their data a modern, cloud-based reporting platform, Solver has now launched what they refer to as “Hybrid Cloud Reporting.†You can see it live in this video. This is a unique integration technology that enables you to:
- Use your web-browser to run beautifully formatted reports (looks like Excel formatting).
- Benefit from true real-time reports on your ERP data without any data transfer to a separate reporting database.
- Drill-down from any number in the report directly into your underlying GP transactional data.Â
- Easy internet and browser-based access with no need for VPN, or software like Terminal Server.
- Enter budgets from user-friendly forms (looks like Excel) in the cloud and have the transactions stored directly into the GL budget table in the ERP database.
- Be better prepared to move to a cloud ERP later because the reporting and budgeting solution is already in the cloud.Â
In other words, now your accountants and reporting end-users get the best of two worlds by only needing a web browser to run live ERP reports and drill-down.
Below is a simple architecture diagram to explain how it works:
What about budgeting and forecasting?
Like many other cloud-based CPM solutions, Solver also offers budgeting and forecasting. With the new Hybrid Cloud technology and Solver’s cloud-based Planning Module, users can store budget data directly back from Solver’s budget forms in the cloud, into the General Ledger budget table in the ERP database.Â
So, if you struggle with manual Excel-based spreadsheets for your budgets, you can save a lot of time by eliminating emailing files between users, linking between spreadsheets, and put better controls in place for the entire budget process with workflow and approvals.Â
As an example, users can access budget forms like the example below with their browser and instantly, until you close the budget process, update their department’s budget in the ERP system. Since Solver’s Hybrid Cloud updates are real-time, reports can immediately be run to see the impact of these changes on the budget.
Enjoy Faster and Better Decisions in the 2020s
Companies like Solver, Prophix, Vena, Adaptive Insights, and Planful are driving the next generation cloud-based reporting and planning technology. However, with the lack of live reporting and live budget write-back to on-premise ERP systems, accountants and very active ERP users have been left with their legacy tools for their real-time reporting needs. Â
With the release of Solver Hybrid Cloud, these users now get the best of both worlds and can start ushering in the 2020’s by enabling themselves and other users with faster and better decisions. Learn more about the benefits of choosing Solver CPM solutions by contacting us today or requesting a demo.Â
Supported ERP systems are: Microsoft Dynamics GP, SL, and NAV, Sage 100 (SQL)*, 300* and 500*, SAP Business One (SQL)*, and Acumatica*.
*) Direct budget writeback not offered for these ERPs.
For many years it seems like every mid-market and enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor has aspired to offer native financial consolidation software. However, they all seem to fall short, often to the disappointment of customers that were promised that their new ERP system easily could produce the consolidated financials from their individual subsidiary ledgers.Â
So why is it so hard for an ERP vendor to deliver the necessary financial consolidation functionality inside the ERP system itself? There can be any number of reasons.
Limitations in Current Financial Consolidation ERPs
- Lack of ability to handle different chart of accounts
- Lack of ability of consolidating across subsidiaries with different fiscal calendars
- Poor currency conversion functionalityÂ
- Weak auto-elimination functionality
- Tedious to post manual consolidation adjustments
- Weak financial report writer to produce the consolidated reports
- Clunky consolidation process with too many stepsÂ
- Problematic to consolidate across subsidiaries with different ERPs
- Lack of dynamic pro-forma consolidations
It would be a controller’s dream if all of these areas were elegantly handled within their ERP system. And, while most mid-market and enterprise ERPs typically can check all or most of the boxes for consolidation features, almost always, consolidating in the ERP it is simply too clunky with too many steps. Because of this, the finance team ends up doing it in Excel where they at least are comfortable with formulas and they can produce professional report layout.Â
Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP
But what about Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (D365 FO) ERP system?Â
While it clearly can be considered one of the top cloud solutions on the market today- alongside SAP, Oracle and Workday– customers with significant consolidations and related financial reporting needs, often end up in Excel in the final steps of the process.Â
While there are plenty of ERP consolidation features in D365 FO, and its native Management Reporter is an above-the-average report writer, it is increasingly normal that customers add on a “best-of-breed†corporate performance management (CPM) solution to streamline their financial consolidation and reporting software. Â
Modern cloud-based CPM solutions
Solver is an example of a CPM solution that comes with several added advantages for Microsoft customers.
Advantages of Solver CPM for Financial Consolidation
- Solution is cloud-based Azure like D365 FO
- Its configurable to D365’s general ledger as well as sub-ledgers
- It has a pre-built connector to Power BI for visualization
Some cloud-based CPM vendors now also offer an Excel add-in to give power users more flexible and familiar report design.Â
End users can still run the same reports in the cloud using their web browsers. They could do the same using their local Excel on the desktop connected to the CPM database in the cloud.
An added advantage of modern cloud-based CPM solutions is that they typically also house advanced budgeting and workflow capabilities. This allow for a single solution and a single report/form designer for both financial reporting, consolidations and budgeting.Â
Level Up Your Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations With Solver
In the next decade, enabling faster and better decisions will be one of the key competitive advantages. This advantage differentiates successful, growing companies from others.Â
Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, a leading ERP solution, is a great cloud-based transaction platform because it drives better data and accounting processes. A modern CPM solution with a snug fit on top of D365 FO and that compliments visualization in Power BI checks the boxes that a finance team needs to take their ERP financial consolidations and reporting processes to the next level.
