It’s a new year. January has arrived and financial teams in companies worldwide have to kick into a different gear.
I’ve been there. In the CFO or controller’s office. Sometimes asking, “Why hadn’t we planned better?” and other times buried in an Excel spreadsheet, making sure consensus around Q4 assumptions was being reflected in the revised plan.
If you’ve been there, too, you know how it goes. Board members want a summary. Executives want the details. Lines of business want their budgets. As deadlines approach and someone finds another mistake, everyone’s stress level goes up just a little bit more. And the crazy thing is that it’s typically the same year after year.
But the world is changing. Software designed to address specific industry challenges and delivered as a service is disrupting every business. Not only every business, but every department in every business is transforming—from customer service to human resources to employee training. And the benefits are clear: faster innovation, higher-quality reporting, and fewer processing errors. Yet unfortunately, finance (with our long-standing affinity for creating our own documents) is falling behind.
Why? Because a truly, easy-to-use system that pulls in data from a wide variety of disparate sources and automatically surfaces insights has never existed
Our goal is to change that. And you can consider the Jirav Blog a first step.
You’ll hear from finance and IT professionals who know from experience that capturing analytics and accurately managing strategic corporate performance is hard:
- It’s time consuming: The average planning cycle takes months and requires full-time employee oversight
- It’s manual: Sharing information collaboratively is difficult and static documents are immediately out of date
- It’s error prone: A preferred method for corporate planning, 88% of spreadsheet documents contain errors, says a University of Hawaii study by Raymond R. Panko
We’ll cover the ins-and-outs of operational and financial data—revenue modeling, cash management, and everything else that goes with strategic corporate performance management. You’ll also hear from IT pros who get how to harness the incredible power of cloud computing and digital technologies including big data analytics to explore historical operations and accurately forecast bookings, revenues, workforce, expenses and cash flows.
Better financial planning starts here. We hope you’ll join the journey.
