What if you could create multiple what-if kind of scenarios in seconds?
Planning the future (forecasting) is essential for the longevity of your business, and your financial forecast is the beating heart of your operation. But what happens when the day-to-day running of your business takes up too much of your time for the actual navigation and altering of your pre-existing income statement or operating expenses? This blog is here to show you how our latest release of what-if scenarios has just made your forecasting life even easier.
We all know how challenging it is to keep on top of everything in a business. Whether you want to make sure that your company doesn't start sinking, or you want to foresee just how bright the future is for your company, if you're not careful with all aspects of forecasting for your business then everything can go wrong. Keeping an eye on the projection is great, but it's not the only kind of thing you should be looking at, you should be looking at all resources and how they align with your goals.
What happens to my financial forecast if I decide to take on more staff next month, but my sales remain the same? What happens to my financial forecast if I move offices or change the location to one of three available sites? In this uncertain economic climate will my exchange rate change, impacting my purchases from international suppliers?
It is in the ability to project all of your possibilities, to weigh them together and to analyse which path to take in the future, that leads to real success and profitability. And that doesn’t just go for business owners either…
How do I know this, and what is my experience with a financial forecast?
I’m a Test Engineer at Futrli, and I deal every day with a dizzying amount of variables and elements that can affect the platform I work on, much in the same way you do for your business. Any small change to the current state of our testing environment can affect the outcome of our results, and we can’t ignore any possibility.
Recently, for example, we’ve been testing our new scenario wizards to make sure that our users in Sydney can load their businesses forecast as quickly as our users in the UK, and rest assured, user locations are just a minuscule part of the product development!
Making what-if scenarios even easier for your business
It can be a daunting challenge when you face difficult decisions in the future of your business. What’s more, changing your core assumptions in your financial plans and re-writing your scenarios and forecasting just to see how one decision affects your future can be a long, time-consuming process. At Futrli, our goal is to let your forecasting take centre stage in your business plan because of the daily actionable insights they share. But, we get it, your business is changing all the time, and so you need to be able to flex multiple different options with ease in order to see your true sales revenue.
Listening to your feedback, we realised that adjusting your core assumptions was taking up too much of your time, so it became our mission to change it. Futrli is designed to save time, so we’ve simplified the entire process for you. We’ve now added the option of allowing you to create a throwaway set of forecasts detailing a specific scenario, without having to rewrite your base assumptions time and time again in order to see your projection.
Our financial forecasting ambition
We created these forecasting scenario wizards to give any business the ability to be prepared for future decisions. These can also work regardless of your industry, so you never have to worry about being unprepared. For wholesalers, a scenario wizard might help financial forecasting to the results of negotiations, and this is especially important for owners who are entering into wholesale agreements with supermarkets or other larger retailers.
As another example, small shop owners approaching the summer season may need forecasting to see how employing any number of staff will affect their profit, given current sales and expenses. A new bar owner may not know their sales projection, so what about financial forecasting against remaining steady, and content measurement, such as projected growth and projected loss?
Seeing these predictions and paths side by side can provide a lifeline to business owners, but our latest feature will have you saving hours of unnecessary configuring to make sure they remain as one. For example, if you updated your rent payments in your ‘remaining steady’ scenario but forgot to do that in the other two. With this adaptability of altering your outer variables, your core assumptions don’t need to change at all. This way, your forecasting and predictions work harder for you, not you working harder for them and you won’t get lost in silly admin errors.
How we adapt for you
In feedback and consultation sessions with you, we heard you loud and clear, having walls of indecipherable data is a no-go for you. That’s why our dashboard visualisations are integrated with your financial forecasts, so you can effortlessly see what action needs to be taken. Both your core assumptions and your additional forecasts are shown beautifully on our scenario charts, with you able to see the outcomes of all your strategies and paths before you. This transparency is vital for business security, and that goes for us Testers too!
Flexible altering of my environment to cater for more than just the projected test path and data allows me to make sure everyone has the best forecasting experience with Futrli. Can our clients in Canada share their boards as speedily and effectively as our clients in the United States, and is that as efficient from the UK to Sydney? What if we alter an organisation’s currency, does the same data show as effortlessly on our reports as dollars as with euros? We don’t miss a beat, and now, neither will you.