Spreadym

04/20/2023

Financial analysis and planning (or FA&P) software is a type of business software that helps companies manage their finances and operational activity by analyzing financial data and providing tools to plan, forecast and make budgets for efficient business growth.
FA&P software is designed to streamline financial management tasks and improve decision-making in planning operations.

Here are some common features of financial analysis and planning (FA&P) software that are essential for business performance management.

Planning: this is the first stage of every business activity. Company’s management at first should realize the volume of good that could be sold, considering all limitations of production and storage capacity, labor availability and logistics bottlenecks. Then all of this physical metrics are transferred in money and here we can proceed to the next step.

Budgeting and forecasting: These tools allow users to create budgets and forecast financial parameters like revenue, net income, costs and so on. Or, simply turn production metrics into money for complex planning. Features of budgeting and forecasting software help users plan the future cash flow.

Cash flow management: Software tools for cash management can help business manage the performance of cash flow by providing detailed cash flow statements and projections. Often cash flow software module can include data modelling tools that based on external inputs like exchange and interest rates or so on.

Investment analysis: Business software tools for investment analysis allow you to analyze investment options and evaluate their potential returns.

Financial reporting: These tools generate financial reports, including income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. It can be important that FA&P software can generate financial reports by several standards. It useful when company have to report financial results by national and international rules.

Tax planning: Some financial analysis and planning software includes tax planning tools that help users forecast and minimize tax liabilities and maximize tax deductions.

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04/18/2023

Enterprise software solutions for planning and financial analysis and corporate consolidation typically require robust and scalable technologies to ensure optimal performance and reliability.

Some of the technologies commonly used for such solutions include:

Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS): business management software often runs on RDBMS such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2 to store and manage large amounts of structured data.

In-Memory technology: In-memory computing technology is becoming increasingly popular for financial analysis and planning (FA&P) and sales and operational planning (S&OP) software as it enables real-time analytics.

Virtualization: Virtualization technology allows multiple operating systems to run on a single physical machine, which can help reduce hardware costs and increase resource utilization. However, we hardly can name it the most efficient technology. Users of this solution always face with a problem of data transfer from one operating system to another, because in spite working on one hard ware it is different machines.

Business Intelligence and Analytics: S&OP and FA&P software for business management requires a powerful and flexible reporting and analytics capabilities to enable effective decision-making. Business intelligence and analytics tools are used to analyze and visualize large volumes of data from multiple sources, identify trends, and forecast demand.

Data Integration and efficient Metadata Management: software for financial and operational planning and also budgeting software must be able to integrate data from various sources, including sales, operations, and finance, to provide a complete picture of the organization's performance. Data integration and management tools are used to extract, transform, and load (ETL) data from multiple sources and create a single source of truth.

Forecasting and Modeling tools: Accurate forecasting and modeling features in business performance software are essential for effective planning and forecasting operational and financial metrics. Statistical modeling, simulation, and predictive analytics tools are used to forecast demand, plan inventory, and optimize production capacity.



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10/24/2022

Companies often find it difficult to figure out how to improve the efficiency of support functions such as finance and accounting. The work of these departments does not directly affect the company's revenue, but without this functionality it is impossible to organize business activities.

However, companies can to increase the efficiency of the accounting service. How to do this, Spreadym team will consider below.

Time and labor management

When we talk about time and labor, we mean time that consumed to make any work operations that are needed to obtain a certain result of work. Accounting business processes depend primarily on the specifics of the business and size. In some sectors, for example, control over the financial activities of enterprises can be tighter, in others it can be softer. In terms of size of business, we also can see differences. The volume of accounting operations of a large holding with many production assets and a number of sales departments is not comparable to a medium-sized business.

Read more https://spreadym.com/insights/tpost/0bftbvjmt1-work-efficiency-in-accounting-department

Companies often find it difficult to figure out how to improve the efficiency of support functions such as finance and accounting. How to do this, Spreadym team will consider below.

10/21/2022

Projects do not live within departments

One young IT company installed an accounting system at the first step of occurrence. But, since real projects never live within the framework of organizational structures, but involve staff from different functional areas, the organization introduced an extra system that helps track employees' time and attendance on projects.

As a result, the work on bringing together the costs of projects and their revenue had to be formed almost manually. After that, the company began to tune the financial accounting system for AGILE planning in order to understand how many employees are involved in the stream and, accordingly, how much the organization spent on personnel during the project.



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Digital transformation of management functions is in the long run, and sometimes it can be quite difficult to outline all of these stages in the initial strategy.

10/17/2022

How to...? Automation in seven steps

When a critical number of problems have accumulated, a company understands that it is high time for digital transformation of the corporate business process. And it does not matter what we can talk about, these problems can be in sales, treasury, financial analysis or even business reporting and budgeting.

In order to carry it out as efficiently as possible and get an automation system that can really solve problems, the company should at first prepare well.

The Spreadym team presents a list of steps to help you prepare for the digital transformation of corporate business processes to increase efficiency of company performance.

Step 1. Accept that automation is inevitable.

As the company grows, so does the number of business processes. Many business operations become routine and grab a lot of time from employees. The amount of information increases every day and needs to be not only safely stored, but also processed for further analytics. What is more, the company may lose control over several processes without proper control of the work.

Digital transformation can really solve these problems. It is able to remove routine tasks, free up staff time for solving more important tasks, reduce the number of errors, and also build effective analytics of the company's activities. Here we also should mention that the investments in business automation help increase efficiency of corporate performance

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When a critical number of problems have accumulated, a company understands that it is high time for digital transformation of the corporate business process.

10/14/2022

Are you a good financial analyst?

Today, companies need not just a financial specialist, but an analyst with a broad technical and professional background. The duties of the financial analyst include a broad set of skills, which allow a company to increase the chances of successfully operating with risks and seizing opportunities.

The financial analyst is involved in all business processes of the company. On this occasion, we collect a starter pack of skills that the financial analyst needs to succeed.

Back to basics

No matter how trite it may sound, it will be difficult to work as a financial analyst without learning the basics of financial and economic disciplines. The mandatory list can include: macro- and microeconomics, financial legislation, theory and methodology of financial analysis, accounting and financial reporting. As long as the analyst does not understand how the economy and an individual enterprise work, how a company should report to the regulator, what are the existing reporting principles, it will not be possible to build a working financial model.

Optionally

Many employers are seeking candidates who have experience with complex financial reporting programs. Understanding the key principles of the accounting system facilitates adaptation to business processes. Even if the previous experience of an analyst includes working with software from another vendor, then used in a company.

Must have

The financial analyst works with a large array of data that comes from different sources. For instance, from various internal corporate systems, statistical reports, carrier’s and customs databases. Processing such arrays of data without special skills can be time-consuming, so the financial analyst must operate the following tools: MS Excel, Power Query, SQL, Python, PowerBI.

All of these tools can be divided into the following streams: data transformation or handling, and visualization.

The first block is the most laborious. Skills in working with data processing tools allow the analyst to optimize the process and reduce the time of working with the database by 80%. Knowledge of the programming language of different tools increases the value of the analyst.

Of course, all these items are very inspiring for self-improvement and learning, but it seems to us that in the 21st century most manual and typical operations can be automated, even in data analytics. Companies can implement a universal solution into business processes based on a familiar interface.

Spreadym meets all the requirements of financial analytics: fast processing of large amounts of data, multidimensional information structuring model, familiar Excel toolkit, wide editing options for calculation.

To learn more about Spreadym visit https://spreadym.com/

Corporate analytics has never been so easy before.

10/10/2022

How to solve it?

Should the production schedule be shifted? Maybe the company should look for another sales channel? What about increasing the staff? The enterprise performance management system can help answer these and many other questions.

Although a vast number of enterprises have already implemented EPM systems, for growing companies their usefulness may not be so obvious yet. Below, the team of Spreadym give a brief overview why your business needs performance management systems and what issues they can help solve.

EPM is a system that not only helps to set up a company's reporting, but also assists in analytics and more complex insight of all business processes. Such systems help to link the financial and production activities of the company for further effective development using tools such as reporting, planning, budgeting and strategic forecasting. The beneficiaries of EPM implementation are usually financial departments, HRs, sales and marketing.

Developers of performance systems pay a lot of attention to business processes. So, the more detailed the process is described, the more effective the management of the entire business can be.

Let's take manufacturing as an example. A good EPM system includes records of all costs for purchasing raw materials, quantities produced by date, marketing and shipping costs, revenue from various sales subsidiaries and so on.

Based on such an array of data, the analyst can conclude whether it is worth transferring production to other capacities, or changing sales channels. Processing such data manually would take a month, the system allows users to build analytics much faster.

Spreadym is a comprehensive business management platform. Due to the multidimensional register of the company's reporting, it allows one to build forecasts and plans in the context of details that meet the business objectives. Whether the user needs to look at the costs of a single item across all branches or forecast profits according to several scenarios, Spreadym will help one do this via the most convenient and familiar Excel interface.

To learn more about Spreadym visit https://spreadym.com/

10/06/2022

The skill of data presentation

Why does one presentation get all the attention of the audience, while another, with a lot of useful information, may only bore? It's simple, after five minutes nobody remembers what information from which statement was concluded, so everyone sees only a mess of data.

The situation gets worse when it comes to the business processes of the company. How is it better to show information detailed by regions, items of expenditure, income from sales of different types of products? Only if you are too desperate and decide to make a million slides. And what will you do if you need present spreadsheets? Would you prefer to create a thousand interconnected tables?

Sure you don’t. Most companies have a long practice of utilizing Business Intelligence systems for analysis and visualization of data by creation of dashboards. And it doesn’t matter if it is a presentation or a spreadsheet. Nobody wants to keep in mind what was ten slides earlier, or what was in one of the previous spreadsheets. It's much easier to use built-in commands to filter items in the main field.

So Spreadym gives you the same opportunities in Excel spreadsheets. The platform allows you to work with a large amount of data in the same table where the report is created. It is no longer a problem to look at the dynamics of the indicator over the past ten years. The user does not have to open other files, or insert additional spreadsheets into the Excel book. You just need to connect to the server, create a form with the desired indicators and set the filtering. Now you can define formulas and complete the report.

To learn more about Spreadym vizit https://spreadym.com/

10/04/2022

Digital transformation in Agriculture

Our team was engaged to proceed with the digital transformation of the financials of an agricultural holding. One of the well-known business management platforms on the market was chosen to structure client’s budget planning activities. The implementation of the platform took more than a year. During this period, we deployed complex calculations of production and sales, we introduced convenient filling forms and structured final reports.

However, using the business system, the client discovered that it did not always meet the users’ expectations in terms of convenience. For instance, all formulas and calculations in the system were designed by developers and hidden from ordinary users. However, it was necessary for the client to look at all links between accounting items in financial models for further approval of budget indicators and attaching reports to a bank. In those conditions, users first had to upload reports from the system to Excel with fixed data, and then manually enter formulas into Excel spreadsheets.

The client asked us to solve this problem, but it was impossible with the existing system. Uploading reports shows only fixed data and formulas that were not available for a view. An ordinary user also could not adjust calculations of indicators. Any change required the involvement of developers, which led to extra costs for the company.

Moreover, some users had worked with Excel for ages and could not, from the first steps, get used to the new system and trust it. They entered the data first into their own Excel spreadsheets, and then uploaded the information into the system for approval and storage.

We realized all of users’ concerns and decided to create a tool that would help solve these problems. Spreadym allows you to operate with complex calculations and save them in one click, the same as in complex business systems. Users can look at the formulas and amend the calculation methodology. The familiar Excel interface allows users to quickly adapt to the system. At the same time, the cost of Spreadym is 5-10 times lower than its counterparts.

To learn more about Spreadym visit https://spreadym.com/

09/30/2022

How to save it?

Is it possible to save money if you decide to implement a business performance management system?

The cost of the implementation of a complex business management system consists of several elements. The most obvious item is the cost of a product license. To this amount must be added the cost of consulting work which undermines the development of the financial models and putting the company's accounts in order. Plus, you should add the cost of tailoring the solution to the company’s needs.

But that’s not the end. The company will need to hire a team of developers, analysts and testers to keep the system running. And if it is necessary to adjust some processes, the company will need to contact consultants and primary developers again. The final cost will be higher. If the client’s company is small or medium-sized, but already requires the organization of a planning system, the cost becomes enormous.

As a result, the management of the company is torn between the need for structuring the financial process and the prioritization of investments. Regarding the fact that the implementation of the complex management system takes about 6 months, the choice becomes even more complicated.

Our team, working on the implementation of Cognos TM1 by IBM, has often observed such dilemmas. Respecting it, we work on Spreadym.

Spreadym is a comprehensive business management system that will allow you to implement digital transformation in corporate accounting and planning processes quickly and at a nice price.

What's the secret? A convenient MS Excel interface that allows a financial analyst to independently make changes to financial models without resorting to the services of the IT-department.

Spreadym can be implemented step by step: at first, one can implement it in one business process, and then it can be extended to all financial activities. We consider the importance of price in decision making, so this approach allows clients to expand the opportunities of digital transformation.

And yes, implementing Spreadym costs 5-10 times less than its counterparts. It’s a rather good advantage, isn’t it?

To learn more about Spreadym visit https://spreadym.com/

09/28/2022

What if …?

One client was very worried about the imposition of export duties on the scrap he sells. After the government expressed its intention, the mass media immediately began to interview experts and publish their assumptions and opinions.

There was no consensus. Different experts named different volumes for untaxed quotas. Other analysts argued that the duty would only affect some of the goods, not the entire group. There was not even a general assumption about the timing of the introduction of regulations: some called January 1, others - March 1. Other experts even said that the export duty would not be introduced at all.

As a result, the client was in a panic. It was not clear how to plan sales and revenue for the next year. We advised him to use the Spreadym platform for scenario modeling.

The platform allows a user to set an array of initial data for calculation, for example, scenario conditions, sales plan, prices. Enter formulas to calculate the model, such as taxes, procurement budget, logistics, etc. And in the end, get the final data, considering several scenarios.

Constructing a model, it is also necessary to remember that some parameters can depend on each other. Changing some indicators can lead to a crucial change in the final results. Spreadym allows the user to test the sensitivity of the entire model and be confident that one doesn’t miss anything.

To learn more about Spreadym visit https://spreadym.com/