Many companies are moving away from Microsoft Excel to a specialised planning and forecasting software solution. Reflex Demand Planning is a highly sophisticated system giving you the tools you need to make informed business decisions – both in the short term and long term.
Business advisors, finance managers, CEOs or business owners can generate increasingly accurate budgets and analyse a multitude of scenarios using Reflex planning and forecasting software. Excel spreadsheets can be problematic to businesses in terms of access, control, workflow, consolidation, and automation plus the scale to cope with large amount of data .
It might be worth switching from Excel if data analysis is becoming increasingly labour-intensive.
The Problem With Excel Forecasting…
When one person is responsible for managing financial data in Excel, it’s immediately clear who is to blame for inaccuracies and errors. However, when several people such as the CEO or the head of sales need to access the data in Excel, it’s a sign that you need to upgrade to specialised forecasting financial software. It can be challenging to identify the source of wrong information if several people have access to the program.
If your company has increased in size, setting up and maintaining different forecasts in Excel can be time-consuming and labour-intensive. Managing spreadsheets is straightforward for a small company, but rapidly developing businesses require input from several people within your organisation and their spreadsheets will need to be consolidated – specialised forecasting financial software can do this automatically.
Consistency is also important – and this is not a strength of Excel.
Larger companies with many different divisions can find it burdensome to amalgamate all reports into a corporate format in a coherently organised way. Forecasting Financial software programs, such as Reflex Planning, offer high levels of consistency, allowing you to use your corporate logo on reports.
How We Help…
Reflex Planning helps businesses of all sizes in budgeting, planning and forecasting by providing greater transparency and ‘drilling down’ into the company’s data. This is a vital part of successful decision-making that is based on an accurate reflection not only of your present financial status but more importantly your financial position as it evolves over next few years.
Some businesses prefer to manually forecast via complex Excel spreadsheets. However, Excel has numerous limitations as it actually isn’t set up for this function. It is also very time-consuming and takes considerable skill and effort to learn how to use the formulas. It can also be difficult to back up as well as to quickly download reports and dashboards when required. Reflex Planning offers a wide scope of business demand forecasting solutions that will reduce the manual aspects of using Excel. Hitchen Foods, for example, found that reliance on Excel no longer suited their company for all these reasons leading to expensive errors in stock control. Using Reflex Planning enables short and long-term predictability which has led to vastly improved stock control whilst maintaining service levels. Get in touch to find out more.
