Financial planning is an essential part of every organization and is critical to setting goals and budgets and ensuring they align with the overall strategy. Unfortunately, this process is painfully slow, cumbersome, and manual for many organizations. Planning is crippled by manual tasks, an inability to collaborate, and complicated reports.

Today’s fast-changing business climate and the explosion of available data do not align well with such a planning process. Those who can find ways to adapt will be tomorrow's winners. Today, many finance and accounting teams are turning to technology for help.

Planning for Maximum ROI

According to industry research, companies can achieve a consistently higher return on digital investments and outpace their peers by following these three steps:

• Look at the big picture,
• Set specific goals and track progress
• Proliferate what works

1. Look at the big picture

First you need to look at the big picture to decide where to focus your efforts. Maximizing your ROI demands a balance between addressing present-day business needs and planning for future developments. Understanding your entire financial planning process, including vulnerabilities, roadblocks, and low-value-add activities, is essential to increasing efficiency and productivity. This knowledge extends beyond financial planning to include non-financial planning, reporting, modeling, forecasting, and other operations. This will enable you to determine which operations can be automated to help eliminate congestion in your processes, as well as where you can improve and focus your efforts.

2. Goal setting and tracking

Setting goals—long and short term—are going to be essential in helping you track and achieve the highest ROI. Improving accuracy, reducing meetings, or shortening planning time are all excellent ways to improve FP&A planning. Overall cost savings, cycle times, and responsiveness are all measurable factors that will contribute to overall growth and performance goals.

3. Maximize the impact in every corner of the business.

It's glaringly obvious that spreadsheet and email-based planning processes cost your organization time and money across the board. That is why implementing software to help automate these tasks is so important. And while automation is a great place to start, it's also critical to allow the business to easily participate in planning processes, collaborate with finance, and have self-service access to the financial intelligence they need to make better, faster decisions. This is where Fincast comes into play. Finicast makes it easy to plan and collaborate all across the company in one place, resulting in successful communication and execution.

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There are benefits of digital transformation in every process of the business. Following the above steps can help you unlock value and improve the overall ROI of any project. To maximize your ROI from planning technology, look at the low-hanging fruit of manual processes while setting a larger strategic roadmap. As more processes become automated, you’ll free up more time to think about where your planning technology can provide the most value in the shortest time.