What CPM Capabilities are Critical to You?
New research on Critical Capabilities for Corporate Performance Management Suites evaluates 12 vendors across 9 critical capabilities in CPM.
How Does Your Finance Team Stack Up? Benchmarks Can Help You Find Out
Like most of us, I try to exercise as regularly and eat healthily. However, I’m also very good at rationalization. Skipping a workout today won’t matter much. I’ll run an extra mile tomorrow. Pizza for lunch? No problem. I’ll cut down at dinner. But unchecked that can lead me to a place I don’t want to be.
Fixing Finance with CPM
A recent article in CFO magazine (Fixing Finance: Work in Progress, March 27, 2014) discusses the great improvement in productivity and cost savings that finance departments have made over the past 15 years. Despite this great improvement 81% of the finance executives surveyed said they were “seriously committed” to more efficiency and effectiveness.
Spreadsheets aren’t the answer for Finance Analytics
Did you know:
Only 12% of organizations are satisfied with the software they use to create and apply analytics,
71% of them use spreadsheets for analytics, a higher percentage than any other tool,
and 67% said spreadsheets cause problems in their use of analytics.
Once again we find the pervasive use of spreadsheets to perform functions they were never meant to do.
Budgeting for Success
Moving away from the annual budget process and into one that is more frequent is a core topic in the recent eBook from CFO.com. The rationale behind it - business changes so frequently that the annualized budget gets out of date pretty quickly. The fact that employees’ performance, and often compensation, is based on this annual plan makes things worse as the battle for the budget usually ends up with a much more conservative, thus achievable, plan. This pretty much makes it out of date out of the gate.
What to do?
Is Your Finance Organization a Top Performer?
According to a recent survey by industry research and benchmarking firm, APQC, top performers’ cost of finance is almost three times lower than bottom performers.
View key benchmarks and findings below.