Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) is largely about anticipating needs. From budgeting to forecasting and planning, predictive intelligence is now empowering teams to conduct accurate scenario modelling based on real information. Making sense of uncertainty, this gives businesses the power to plan for the future with both confidence and accuracy.

Making Informed Financial Decisions: Embracing Digital Solutions  

There’s no doubt that the world is infinitely more complex than just decades ago – and this complexity continues to increase at an exponential rate. CFOs are hard-pressed to keep pace, making sense of dynamic markets and acting with certainty to protect the financial interests of the business.

Unfortunately, many organisations are still using archaic spreadsheets for financial planning. BizData cites “unreported data errors, dark spots in reporting, lost data, unreliable documentation and a contribution to a poor organisational data culture” as key reasons to move away from Excel planning processes.

With advanced EPM solutions easily available on the market, however, financial planning activities are largely automated, human error is eliminated, accuracy is enhanced, and finance teams are freed up to focus on more value adding tasks – all while predictive intelligence continues to augment EPM and drive greater decision-making power.

Transforming Finance with Total Predictability

Predictive intelligence leverages predictive analytics – a form of advanced analytics. According to Gartner, predictive analytics allows finance teams to gain unmatched access to real-time data to answer the pertinent question; “what is likely to happen?”, utilising techniques such as:

• Forecasting
• Predictive modelling
• Regression analysis
• Multivariate statistics

The Benefits of Predictive Intelligence in Finance

Today’s out-of-the-box predictive planning solutions offer a wealth of benefits, effortlessly taking businesses from spreadsheet headaches to actionable insights. Users enjoy:

• Integrated data and analytics to identify trends, highlight business drivers, and leverage opportunities
• More agility, greater insights, and real time results
• Explainable predictions, driving improved financial performance
• Transparency, certainty, and accuracy
• Vastly enhanced data-driven decision making power
• Embedded machine learning training on historical data to produce accurate plans
• Aligned finance and operations teams

In this fast-moving, data-driven world, financial planning demands the ability to make intelligent correlations between financial, operational, and external data. With predictive intelligence, this becomes a reality.