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Business as Usual in an Established Company

Your established business is focused on maximizing profitability in its current business model. This means focusing on cost reduction/ efficiency and making wise investments to stay competitive and grow. An effective financial management system will help you manage your business by showing you both "what happened?" and "what if?" in black and white.

Every business owner asks themselves the same question at the end of the month, "what happened?" The better you are answering this question the more effective you will be at managing your business. Budgeting at the account level will enable you to dissect your results by comparing them to targets. Your time and resources can be allocated most efficiently when you have diagnosed the key drivers of financial performance using the array of analytics tools in the PlanGuru products. Actively measuring your financial performance will help you identify challenges and opportunities before it is too late.

The next question all business owners need to ask themselves is “what if?” Your historical data is the starting point for a multi-year forecast. Use your understanding of the current business environment to project your future financials line by line. PlanGuru will roll this all up and show you what the future financial picture of your company will look like given your assumptions. The next step is performing sensitivity analysis on the key variables to see how changes will affect your profitability/ cash flow situation.

Small Company: Business as Usual
Very few businesses are so simple that budgeting and planning cannot help them increase their bottom line. This process will help you identify areas for improvement among the mountains of small charges that eat away at your bottom line. Small or family owned businesses face a unique set of financial challenges; budgeting and planning will help you deal will these challenges most effectively.

The smaller your business is the less attention vendors, lenders and investors are willing to give you. This means you need to get it right the first time when applying for a loan or trying to convince a vendor to give you favorable leasing/ financing terms. A strong financial management system will differentiate your business from its piers and make you a more attractive business partner.

Business continuity planning is something that all small business owners must consider. Would the business be able to continue if something happened to you? What would be the impact of fire or flood on a key facility? Small businesses have less and less room for error when it comes to assessing and mitigating the non-business risks. PlanGuru can help you quantify and understand the financial impact of disruptions to your normal business operations. This type of analysis can help you understand your true insurance needs and develop contingency plans.

PlanGuru Professional Edition is great for businesses without a complex financial organization. These products will give you the tools to perform meaningful, value creating analysis on your business.

Medium Sized Company: Business as Usual:
Businesses of all sizes can benefit from budgeting and planning, but the bigger you get the more you need it. You might already be budgeting on a monthly or quarterly basis, but is your analysis being used effectively in the decision making process, or is it just numbers on a page? The complexities of larger organizations demand that your analysis be both flexible and robust. The PlanGuru Consultant Edition enables you to create a performance measurement system that provides information you can not get from financial statements.

If your business has multiple divisions or departments it is important that you can examine their performance individually. It is difficult to answer the question “what happened?” when viewing your company in a consolidated fashion. It is equally difficult to develop and refine the assumptions in your forecasts without getting into the weeds, department by department. The consolidation feature in the PlanGuru Consultant edition will allow you to roll up 20 separate departments, divisions or subsidiaries into one consolidated analysis.

It is sometimes difficult to understand the full ramifications of a decision or the impact of a change in business conditions across a complex organization. Being able to change a key variable and perform sensitivity analysis will give you important information about your business. PlanGuru Consultant Edition will enable you to run side-by-side comparisons for up to five different scenarios.

Most business owners will need to place a value on their company at some point. This can be for selling the company, raising capital, litigation or estate planning. Business valuation can also be used in the management process; at a fundamental level you should always manage your business to maximize value. A valuation, by incorporating the time value of money and risk, allows you to summarize the future prospects of your business into one number. This means when evaluating two proposals having distinctly different characteristics, the impact to your valuation should ultimately be the deciding factor. The valuation feature in PlanGuru Consultant Edition will make valuation a natural extension of your planning and budgeting process.

Other Business Scenarios and PlanGuru

How PlanGuru can help an Entrepreneur
How PlanGuru can help a High Growth Company
How PlanGuru can help in transformational change
How PlanGuru can help a Company in financial distress
How PlanGuru can help Accountants and Financial Services