Software technology can be an invaluable tool for managing different aspects of company finances. In particular, Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software can help monitor the financial health of a company in real time, facilitate better business decisions, and enable long-term planning.
In this article, we discuss why a purpose-designed corporate performance management solution is an essential investment for every mid-large sized organisation.
What Is CPM Software?
Corporate performance management software is a tool created to help monitor and manage the overall financial performance of an organisation, including the ebbs and flows of cash flow, sales, investments, and liabilities. The platform can support your financial management strategy in various ways:
- By offering rich and wide-ranging data analysis at a glance from a user dashboard.
- By consolidating vital financial information from diverse channels into a single data source, you can confidently carry out budgeting, planning and reporting operations without needing to switch between different applications.
What Are The Benefits of Corporate Performance Management Solutions?
CPM software is a data-driven solution that can facilitate the smooth running of several critical processes. The key benefits include:
1) It Supports an Agile Finance Strategy
As the past two years have shown, annual financial projections can be unexpectedly affected by external factors. This highlights the importance of incorporating rolling re-forecasts into your financial strategy. With CPM software, finance directors can compare forecasts and demand predictions against actual performance so their strategy can be modified as required.
2) Improved Decision Making
Having a wealth of data to hand, in a legible and accessible format, can enable better decision-making and improved risk management, and can therefore facilitate a more agile response should the unexpected happen.
CPM software allows you to model multiple ‘what-if’ scenarios and run rolling forecasts based on those projections. As such, it’s an essential business intelligence solution that eliminates guesswork from important financial decisions.
3) Versatility
One of the most decisive factors when choosing software or digital tools is how well they can be integrated into existing process and performance improvement frameworks. CPM software is a versatile solution that can be integrated across your business process, and includes a range of customisable scorecards, and KPIs.
4) Improved Accountability and Compliance
The best CPM solutions can incorporate any internal and external reporting framework, so you can proceed with planning, forecasting, and budgeting, while ensuring operations are fully compliant. Moreover, thanks to their multiple metrics and reporting functions, these tools have tracking capabilities that improve accountability and strengthen all financial planning processes.
5) Smooth Collaboration
Successful financial management acquires an additional layer of complexity in medium-sized and large organisations. Even within a single finance department, functions are often clearly differentiated between planning and analysis vs. reporting and compliance, with each team using different tools.
You can tackle complexity by consolidating functions, which is what CPM software does. When this tool is implemented across a department or an organisation, different teams can collaborate smoothly and transparently using a unified solution, instead of a fragmented approach.
6) A Global View of Financial Health
Corporate financial health isn’t just an amalgam of isolated factors; it’s a complex and ever-changing ecosystem consisting of people, systems, and processes. CPM software offers a global, top level view of all these factors. With this comprehensive perspective, you can easily determine which areas are underperforming and need to be adjusted.
CPM tools like Corporate Planner offer more than just data: they put at your fingertips valuable insights into trends that may be emerging from large data sets. Having this information can help streamline the financial management process, foster a collaborative environment, and allow for better performance and decision making.
Find Out More
Get in touch with Account-Ability today to find out how a Corporate Planner can improve the operational efficiency of your financial strategy.
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