During a live webcast and poll with ICAEW members in May 2014, the Top 2 barriers to adopting planning, budgeting and forecasting (PB&F) best practice solutions were identified as competing business priorities followed by operating model and process complexity. With CFO surveys showing that expansion is the CFO’s top priority in 2014 and driving most investment and hiring decisions, these organisational barriers are coming down. Business expansion drives a need to model, plan, analyse and report with ever more accuracy and frequency.

Poll results also showed that 66% of people identified too much time spent data gathering and a lack of direct link between the Strategic, Financial and Operational plans being the Top 2 problems with the PB&F process, closely followed in 3rd place with the problem of multiple versions of the plan with inconsistent assumptions, business rules and master data.

PureApps Jay Verma FCCA BA (Hons), EPM Transformation Lead and Julie Harris, Business Development Manager, went on to discuss best practices being applied to alleviate the problems with the PB&F process and how the appropriate and effective use of technology is now an important factor to increase efficiency and effectiveness. The discussion also touched on how the entry point for companies to adopt technology has dramatically shifted downwards, largely due to the arrival of Cloud applications such as Oracle’s Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service.