You might want a monthly import of your trial balance to the Consolidation module or an update from your Sales system to populate the Sales Plan, or an API link to pull in the latest foreign currency rates and update your systems. Whatever the format, data can be extracted, formatted and combined according to your business needs then uploaded to your Planning, Reporting or Consolidation model. When it comes to building a meaningful forecast you want to pull actuals into your model along with an integrated p&L, balance sheet and cashflow view of the plan. Whatever the source, if it’s important to you, you’ll want to connect your forecast to it. Even feeds from Twitter or the BBC might be critical to your business and forecasting. Increasingly though, sources such as key industry databases might be as important many NHS models use weather forecasts to predict future demand whilst car manufacturers can predict servicing volumes based on data sent directly from their cars. You will certainly want data from your own systems be that General Ledger, HR, Sales or Production system, and probably external data such as latest exchange rates. The power this provides finance teams, is immense, but so is the integration challenge.
In our ever connected world, data is being fed from sources we would never have dreamed of even 10 years ago.
Creating accurate, up-to-date forecasts and plans requires today’s finance teams to extract data from many sources. Integration of data is an on-going headache for finance.