When putting together next year’s business forecast, there are key elements the financial team must factor in. Other than the obvious labor wages and cost of raw materials, there are variables that can impact your ability to forecast accurately.
Weighing in such factors as a fluctuating US currency and its implications on the cost of manufacturing and buying goods and services around the world, will allow your organization to plan and to better hedge the risk of missing your numbers by up to 5% annually.
Integrating data from various business units
Another element that can favorably influence the figures when creating an effective forecasting process within your organisation, is to allow for seamless collaboration between your teams. Information from your sales teams provides you the outlook into the coming year, pre-sales and delivery teams that engage with customers provide the ever so valuable risks associated with deal closing. Supply chain data and the cost of doing business is populated by ERP systems and those teams managing your assembly line. This is why you must have a collaborative approach and process when gathering the information from the various groups. This will facilitate crucial data sharing , cross examining and eventual joint decision and approval. This can be done using collaborative cash management systems that understand this requirement and allow you to integrate data from the various downstream systems.
A closer look at the business financials
An integrative platform that gathers financial data from your ERP systems and sales projection from sales and CRM systems, can essentially provide you with an accurate, on-demand global cash position; obtain advanced cash flow forecasts and execute strategies; minimise human errors and manual handling and, frankly, save you an awful lot of frustration.
Certomo provides integration with ERP systems such as SAP or Microsoft D365, as well as seamless integration with Sales and CRM tools such as Salesforce and Hubspot. Once you have completed the integration, Certomo will automatically track and monitor all cash flow related activity from within those downstream systems and allow the financial team to focus on cash strategies and execution.