Driver Based Planning

Two of the biggest challenges in any budgeting process are time and accuracy. The time invested by end users and corporate consumers can be extremely significant, and large diverse end user communities can make data consistency and accuracy daunting tasks. A solution to both of these issues can be found by utilizing driver based planning.

Drivers based planning can minimize these challenges by providing calculations that will do two things – minimize the amounts of data needed to be entered by end users and ensure that values line items are being calculated correctly while keeping the relationships between line items consistent. A very simple example of driver based planning might be an expense line item such as sales commissions. Without driver based planning an end user would need to manually enter in the amounts they expect to spend on sales commissions, which may or may not match the amounts considered reasonable by the corporate office. By creating a driver to force sales commissions to be a fixed percentage of sales, both challenges of the budget process are mitigated - the end user will need to enter less data, and corporate can be assured that sales commissions are being calculated on a consistent basis. Although this is only a small example, drivers can be applied to many different aspects of an organization’s planning process to further address their budget process challenges.

Finit’s consultants bring years of experience to the table, providing them with the unique ability to recommend best practices with regards to what drivers to use, where to use them, and how best to configure them for performance. By understanding your organization’s needs and combining that knowledge with their experience, Finit can truly work with you to develop a Planning solution that will help put the concerns of both end users and corporate consumers at ease.