The forecast can be slimmed down and more summarized than the budget

Description

When re-forecasting each month, managing data at the depth of a budget can be time consuming. For this requirement, the system must be able to summarize values like accounts for monthly forecasting, reducing data entry.

Example Use Case

Scenario: Acme Corporation uses CPM software for its annual financial planning. While the system generates detailed budget data for each department, including line items for salaries, office expenses, advertising, etc., forecasting at that level of detail will take too long each month.

Solution: The system is configured to streamline forecasts by summarizing the line items into broader categories like "Human Resources", "Operating Expenses", "Marketing", etc., instead of providing detailed information. This slimmed-down forecast version is easily digestible, efficient for overall decision making, and keeps upper management focused on bigger picture financial decisions.

Considerations

Some products will allow you to simply click a collapse icon, shrinking all of the accounts into one hierarchy. That allows, for example, all the travel accounts to be collapsed into “Travel” instead of Hotel, Per Diem, Flight, and so on. This would reduce cells that needed to be edited each month to 1 from potentially 10 or more. However, this approach tends to be unique to the user which means each user has to make these edits themselves.

Ideally the system supports an alternate hierarchy for the forecast which presents the accounts and dimensions in a summarized manner dictated by the administrator. So, whenever anyone logs into the forecast for the month, those travel accounts are automatically summarized.

Questions to Ask a Vendor

• Customization Flexibility: How much flexibility does the system allow in slimming down and summarizing forecasts? Can different users receive different levels of detail?
• Budget vs Forecast: If we want to make a comparison, how does it work if we have both summarized and detailed information in our accounts?