In a follow-up to my previous post (How to Select the Right CPM Software For Your Medium-Sized Business), I want to highlight some reasons why your small business needs Corporate Performance Management.
1. You don’t have enough time.
As a small business owner, you are stretched thin having to manage and operate all aspects of your business. Using spreadsheets to decipher, analyze, and report large amounts of financial data is a time-draining activity. Not to mention, you are most likely spending extra hours formatting, cutting and pasting, and creating formulas and layouts.
Your small business needs Corporate Performance Management because it drastically reduces the time it takes to access and organize your financial data.
2. You need accuracy.
Research has shown that nearly 90% of spreadsheets contain some kind of error. If that alone wasn’t a big enough issue, the fact that many small businesses are juggling two or three financial reporting & analysis software programs, while mid-level companies may be juggling four to seven, should be.
Excel is a static financial reporting & analysis solution. It is unable to bring together these various programs and therefore creates a breeding ground for financial reporting & analysis errors. When companies have data that’s updated in real time for all users, it means less iteration, fewer update delays, and more veracity in the data. In other words, integrating your data into one centralized source through a cloud-based financial dashboard is a genius way of ensuring that fewer reporting errors rear their ugly heads.
Your small business needs Corporate Performance Management because it supports more efficient financial processes, providing you with transparency.
3. Your business is constantly changing and (hopefully) growing.
As your small business grows, the amount of paperwork you will have will grow with it. Imagining methods to tackle that much paperwork is probably one of the scariest things a small business owner has to deal with. While using spreadsheets, there is no comprehensive overview of the budget and multiple versions of the truth about the financial performance. In other words, they lack perspective.
Your small business needs Corporate Performance Management because it offers you the ability to analyze your historical data, along with present-day trends and patterns, to predict future outcomes.
4. You need to be able to access your financial data.
Companies who still use spreadsheets for revenue planning and forecasting have to manually collect and enter all the data from Sales. This process and method of revenue planning is often prone to errors and blocks the finance department from having confidence in the data they are dealing with and presenting to other departments. It takes time to compile financial information, but what if someone requires it in minutes?
Your small business needs Corporate Performance Management because integrating CPM software with your EPM system allows you to easily access and organize your financial data. This integration is another huge relief for Finance departments who normally have to wait for Sales to distribute their figures. By implementing EMP software, Finance can permanently be up to date with the Sales data.
5. You need to focus on action.
With so many things to think about and keep organized, for a small business owner it can feel almost impossible to actually have the over-arching corporate goals to be clearly linked to daily operational activities. The purpose of operational planning is to outline, in detail, your business’s operation and future growth projections in order to achieve tactical objectives. Let’s think of your operational plan like an orienteering map — something that helps your team easily navigate its way to success, while also steering you through any obstacles or unexpected hurdles that may come your way.
Your small business needs Corporate Performance Management because it helps to link the achievement of corporate goals to operational activities — month to month, or weekly if you need.
How can Kepion Planning help my business grow?
Kepion Planning can scale as your business grows. Our flexible app modeling platform allows your business to start with a baseline model for budgeting, forecasting and reporting. As your business process grows to more complexity, Kepion can help simplify by automating your complex processes into a streamlined and intuitive process flow within our web interfaces.
Is my business too small to use Kepion Planning?
Kepion provides flexibility for both small and large enterprises to take advantage. Small businesses can leverage one of our pre-built apps to get started quickly, while mid-size to large enterprises can use our Business Intelligence BI modeler tool to build the solutions that fit around the way they work.
No longer operate under separate planning & reporting processes. With Kepion’s Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Solution, you can collaborate on a single approach for integrated business planning. Designed for the business, by the business, Kepion’s Corporate Performance Management Software allows sales, finance, operations, marketing and HR to configure personalized planning apps specifically to how they work. Kepion’s Dashboards and Scorecards Software helps you visualize performance, plan for efficiencies and track your results.